Paul Foot - Malcolm Head
Playhouse
Supporting the act that people have paid to see must be one of the toughest gigs to pull off, particularly as so many performers have dispensed with them in this straitened times. Whether there to warm up an audience or because they've been generously offered a moment in the spotlight, there is so often the niggling feeling that we'd all rather get on with what we came for. Hats off, therefore, to Malcolm Head for carving out a 20 minute routine that earned its keep. His deconstruction of the form was deftly done, and a smart way to set him apart from the headline act. Some purposefully lame poetry, a lot of audience interaction and a cheeky dismissal of conventional stand up combined with an assured delivery to bring something whimsical and different to the stage.
Paul Foot is an odd fellow. Given his bonkers clothes, preposterous haircut and frenetic delivery this is hardly breaking news, but he really is very odd. I assume what we see on stage is, at the very least, a heightened version of the man himself, but perhaps it’s an entirely fabricated character. It's a blurred, and somewhat unsettling, line. In the spirit of investigative journalism, maybe I should have elbowed my way past his adoring fans surrounding him in the foyer after the show. He certainly has fans aplenty, who lapped up every word of his eccentric routine, in what was an unusually lively night at the Playhouse, which kicked off with an early ejection of a disruptive heckler.
Incoherent rather than abusive, I felt her removal was precipitous. Having announced she once applied to be Foot's personal assistant 10 years ago, she chundered away for a while before the current post holder orchestrated her removal. Foot seemed more than happy to riff off the situation - what he described as his ill-advised ad libs were some of the funniest lines of the night. Have comedy gigs become so safe that a drunk needs to be hustled out the building before the talent so much as breaks into a sweat? It meant that we got back to a somewhat laboured routine about life jackets all the quicker, and I guess the bear pits of the nineties are best left in the past, but something has been lost in the process, and that's a shame.
With the absurdity of airline safety covered, Foot moved on to other matters of note. Dragons Den, the Aztecs, aphrodisiacs, the Titanic and adverts all got a turn, in a set that was - depending on your inclination - pleasingly discursive or shambolically rambling. I got the sense it helped to be in on the joke. When his "disturbances" were produced from a briefcase they got a cheer from the initiated that pre-empted the comedy gold therein. I was reminded of a John Otway gig, of all things, where the whole point is knowing what's coming. Judging by the number of walk-outs not everyone did know. It takes a lot to stumble and grope your way out of a seated venue. You must be having a really bad time to do that when another 15 minutes will see you safely back out on the streets anyway. I've grimly sat through the likes of Jerry Sadovitz and Scott Capurro, too timid to jump ship despite the odious material delivered. I remain puzzled why the personable and jolly Foot divided audience opinion quite so starkly. To my mind, he delivered substantially what was expected of him, so you have to wonder what those people thought they were getting.
Harmless fun is what I'd be putting on the poster which is, perhaps, damning with faint praise. If I had a frustration it was a suspicion that Foot could be a far more thought provoking comedian than he allows himself to be. For all the seeming chaos, his routine was packed with clever call backs and sly commentary. Particularly telling was a fleeting reference to the extermination if his extended family in the holocaust. It was a throwaway line, as shocking for its casualness as it's brutality, and had the audience floundering for a moment. Presumably true, it struck me as more audacious than any number of supposedly brave routines from more obviously abrasive comics, and a tiny glimpse of where Foot might go should he dare to.
