Lost Voice Guy
His opening salvo is a warning that if I don’t laugh at the disabled guy I will go to hell
Like so many overnight sensations, Lee Ridley had been trading under the brand name Lost Voice Guy for years before being “discovered” on Britain’s Got Talent. He had even been discovered once before by the BBC, winning a New Comedy award, but to no great effect. As a regular attendee at the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s tempting to claim that I had the perspicacity to have been there, back in 2013, when he first performed to a paying audience, but I’ve looked it up, and I was elsewhere watching someone pretend to be Richard Burton at the time. He’s been back every year since, without our paths crossing, like so many jobbing comedians waving not drowning, but failing to get noticed, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one feeling a little sheepish that it took a leviathan of a TV talent show to get me to one of his shows.
Before Ridley comes on, however, there is a chance to double dip into the pot of BGT, as Jonny Awson takes to the stage. Awson didn’t make it to the final the year he appeared, and perhaps that’s because his act relies so heavily on creating an intimate relationship with a live audience. From the outset he had the Playhouse crowd making animal noises, playing the triangle, and dancing about on stage. His routines elicited more chuckles than belly laughs, but he was very personable fellow, building his routine nicely, to a point where the whole audience is a leg kicking, phone waving, fist pumping chorus of approval. What Awson cleverly, and generously, did was build a bridge between performer and audience for Ridley to work on. When Ridley first appears, while there is clearly a lot of love in the room for him, it is to Awson’s credit that we’ve been warmed up in the first place.
Helped to his chair, Ridley takes a while to get his iPad going and I’m surely not alone in really, really hoping I laugh because it’s good, and not just because I feel obliged to. One step ahead, as Ridley seems to be throughout the evening, his opening salvo is a warning that if I don’t laugh at the disabled guy I will go to hell. It’s a double-edged comment that reverberates throughout his set. Peppered with straightforward gags, the evening is nonetheless more about the irony that while he is now the progenitor of laughter rather than the object of ridicule, we are still laughing and he is still disabled. A running joke is the limitation his synthesised voice imposes on the comedy, yet his timing is remarkable, as is his foresight in pre-preparing what turns out to be the right thing to say at just the right time. Notwithstanding the monotone delivery (“I’m still working on the sarcastic setting”) it’s very easy to forget this is a man pressing buttons, even when he jumped into well tested routines about satnav’s and switching himself on and off. There was also room for a great deal more straightforward silliness, including an excellent little movie, some very stupid notes left in hotel rooms, and perhaps inevitably, a meltdown of technology when Simon Cowell came up for discussion.
All of which is jolly good fun, but his underlying frustration at people’s idiocy eventually seeped out in a way that was altogether darker than we got to see at his Royal Command Performance. Some of the most effective parts of the evening proved to be when the jokes melted away entirely, revealing a keen mind righteously indignant at the sophistry of lazy stereotyping and a complacent government. What emerged was ambivalence towards the persona that has been thrust upon him – as plucky role model fighting the odds – and something close to anger that fame is what it takes to be treated with civility if you are disabled.
