Bridget Christie @ Norwich Playhouse
Bridget Christie deserves to be more of a household name
Bridget Christie is not a household name, and she acknowledges this in the first couple of minutes of this, her tenth show, A Book for Her. For the benefit of the newer members of the audience, unaware of her work besides her recent stint at the Guardian (a following she describes as "looking like the extras queue for Midsomer Murders"), she introduces herself as Bridget Christie, 44, wife, mother, feminist, occasional newspaper columnist and Charles II lookalike.The first half of the show is a very laid back affair, almost as if she were her own support act. Asking whether or not women are funny (spoiler - they are) and why is it that Sterling Moss has the mental capacity to drive a fast car, but not use a lift properly? Much like her friends Mark Thomas and Josie Long do on tour, she uses this first part to win over the audience with effortless charm, before the main bulk of the show in the second part.The headline act sees a completely different Christie fly at a breathless pace, with a well worked routine that sends up sexism for how ludicrous it truly is, breaks down feminism to its simplest form and asks whether it can ever be acceptable for a white person to imitate a black person?
As this show is almost a year old and the tour is coming to a close, a couple of the references feel a little dated (character comedian Nigel Farage, Rachel Dolezal, the now scrapped Menstruation Tax), but the quality of the routines and the passionate delivery keep you engaged throughout. Christie's observations and views of the injustices of modern society are pretty spot on and she backs them up with a dizzying amount of facts and statistics, all delivered with well rehearsed precision. She sees "fact, logic, reason and common sense" as the basis for forming any kind of opinion on a subject. An outlook sadly dwindling in today's Tory Britain.Christie observes towards the end of the evening that not appearing on many panel shows means she's not in the public eye so much, and she's right. Although the shows she's turned down wouldn't have been a good fit for her style of comedy. Surely if the Beeb will show her husband Stewart Lee masticating on BBC2 for 10 minutes, they can find the right TV format and fit her into the schedule somewhere. I hope they do. Bridget Christie deserves to be more of a household name.
