Brian Butterfield - The Call of Now

Character comedy is notoriously difficult to pull off, the alchemy required to create a Dame Edna or a Pub Landlord a dark art shrouded in mystery. For every Alan Partridge in the spotlight, there's a Tony Ferrino in the shadows, for every John Shuttleworth in your dreams, there's a Dave Tordoff in your nightmares. It's not a crowded market, but much like Brian Butterfield's career, it's a field littered with the detritus of failure, so hat's off to Peter Serafinowicz for entering the fray with such gusto.

The character of Butterfield has been lurking about for years, the Banquo's ghost of the fondly remembered, but short-lived, Peter Serafinowicz Show. The conceit is that Butterfield is a deluded entrepreneur, blind to his own faults as he lurches from one business failure to another, valuing perseverance above success, hope above financial probity. Previously confined to the elbow room afforded by short, snappy sketches, the challenge for Peter Serafinowicz was how to flesh the character out to fill an evening's entertainment.

He certainly fleshed out Butterfield's considerable girth, in a disturbingly convincing fat suit that had the performer wheezing and sweating in a way that didn't seem entirely attributable to characterisation. Hopefully, the same can't be said of the opening gag, as Butterfield self-administers defibrillation following an on stage heart attack. As an exemplar of the broad comedy we were in for, it marked his card from the outset - subtlety was never going to be part of the deal. What followed was a grotesquely exaggerated business seminar by a man least equipped to give it. Anyone who has ever had to sit through a talk explaining how to manoeuvre around rocks on the runway in order to run ideas up the flagpole, will have squirmed with uncomfortable recognition as Butterfield took as through his five key 'Bs' of business, only one of which begins with the letter B. Because they are actually bees, requiring a convoluted aide-memoire so impossible to follow that - keep up at the back - yet more explanation was required in one of the more inspired routines of the night.

The jokes then came along thick and fast, and while not all of them landed - an attempt at audience participation didn't really go anywhere - there were enough packed into the show to keep his audience on side and laughing. Punctuated with frequent filmed inserts and handsomely staged, Serafinowicz was obviously keen to give his fans a proper show, and the audience responded generously, happy to buy into the jolly pretence that Butterfield was a man worth listening to, notwithstanding that he spoke in misfired aphorisms and mangled jargonise.

Much of the first half of the show was devoted to pay offs, and while the request for business ideas, the Windows 94 intro and the anticipated rocket launch signalled treats to come, I did start to wonder how much further Serafinowicz could take the character. Upon my return from the interval I spotted an empty seat close by. Who can say whether the previous occupant was similarly sceptical or had actually thought they had booked a genuine business seminar, but either way they missed a conclusion that drew together the various strands of the first half in a way that was both imaginative and oddly touching.

Which is not to say utter silliness was entirely abandoned - the opening musical number brought to mind the late, great Neil Innes with Butterfield, dressed in his best showbiz outfit, hefting his considerable bulk around the stage to music, lights, action that must have had the defibrillator on stand up. What followed, however - with a Beckettian poignancy - was the very antithesis of the previously showcased glitz, as Butterworth left the stage, and left his mic on, in search of the loo, for ages. It audaciously signalled a gear change in an evening that started with foolishness but ended in a Damascene moment of self-awareness, as Brian's priapic rocket literally flopped, and he finally realised he was a failure. It says much for Peter Serafinowicz's acting skills that the audience sought to disabuse Brian of self-doubt, such was their affection for the character.

I would have liked to have seen more of this, a depth that Serafinowicz seemed wary of entertaining. Had he said that ‘every failure is a lesson learned, and I’ve earned more than my fair share’ it would have nicely counterpointed the hyperbole of ‘I’ve learned more than 1,400 lessons’, which is still a good gag but hardly rooted in reality. That said, reality wasn’t what the punters had come to see, and who can blame them in these trying times. In a delicious moment of meta-comedy he ultimately concludes he is a success, having fleeced the audience for the ticket price, but to say more would be to spoil the participatory conclusion to an evening that celebrated the silly, while gently nodding at the underlying vapidity of self-belief triumphing over ability.