Paul F Taylor Archives - The Real Chrisparkle

These online comedy gigs courtesy of the Comedy Crate and the Atic have proved very successful so the initial plan for four Sundays throughout February has extended into March, and I for one am delighted about that! It’s a great way to relax into your Sunday evening before preparing for another Monday of Big Business and Commercial Challenges… sorry, I mean, staying at home and not knowing what day it is from one day to the next.

Our regular host Ryan Mold welcomed us all on board with his bright, cheery presence and some great new material including an embarrassing remote conversation with people on a bus, and the joys of being colour-blind. It’s much more difficult to engage with a zoom audience than a conventional audience because there’s no hiding place in a regular club or theatre, whereas online you can pretend not to hear or indeed just switch your cam off whilst you go and cook the evening meal! But he does a great job at keeping us all involved.

It was a five-act show last night – virtually Shakespearean in construct. First off the block was Scott Bennett, whom we saw a few years ago supporting Rob Brydon at the Royal and Derngate and he was brilliant. Again yesterday he has a fantastic, lively presence with great, surefooted delivery and heaps of material to share. I loved all his observations about taking kids on an aeroplane, his printer being his mortal enemy and, most of all, those unromantic evenings when you’re “trying for a baby”. The jokes were overflowing as was the laughter. A really great start.

Next up was Paul F Taylor, whom we’d also seen at a Screaming Blue Murder seven years ago. He has a terrific zany approach to his comedy with a nice balance of the surreal and the stupid. Last night he did a great routine about how one of your hands is a reliable tool all your life but the other is a hanger-on – very funny. I also liked his exploration of which professions are suffering most during lockdown. I’m not sure the zoom medium works that well for his particular comedic style; you can tell he yearns for interpersonal stage connections to make things flow for the best. But he has great material and has a very likeable stage persona.

Middle act, and a last minute change to our schedule, was Jenny Collier. New to us, I liked how she uses her Queen’s English accent to shock with the use of the C word! In fact she didn’t hold back from discussing some of the seamier sides of life, but it was all done with great timing and a very engaging personality. She had some great material about doing the NHS clap in a Welsh village, and also the very recognisable observations about life as a GP receptionist. Very enjoyable!

Next came Jack Gleadow, also new to us, and clearly a naturally funny guy, with a great feel for language (I loved his malapropism for Covid) and silliness (as in his impression of David Attenborough). He was also responsible for my favourite joke of the night, concerning comments made on porn videos, and we were his brief, but very funny, participants in his Meet The Audience section. He’s definitely someone we’d like to see IRL (as the young people say) when this is all over.

And our headline act was the marvellous Troy Hawke, Milo McCabe’s brilliant Clark Gable lookalike comic creation, and probably the only person on a zoom call who’d naturally don a smoking jacket. Again, he’s another comic who thrives on the interaction with the audience – we’ve seen him do Spank! in Edinburgh a few times – which is a challenge on zoom but he rises to it superbly, remarking on people’s living rooms, camera angles, lighting and so on – a perfect alternative to teasing them in person. His unexpected accents – such as that of the Glaswegian audience member – are terrifically funny as they’re so at odds with Troy’s own voice and demeanour. I really enjoyed his material about impostor syndrome and nurses versus influencers. An excellent way to end the evening.

I’m already booked for next week’s show which has the promise of some terrific acts – are you?

We’ve been having such a good time at the Screaming Blue Murders recently that we have been encouraging more friends to come and join us. Last Friday we were accompanied by the Sheriff of Shenstone, Lady Lichfield and the young Baron Brownhills. We were expecting our usual host Dan Evans to appear but in a change to the advertised programme, the show was hosted by Kate Smurthwaite, whose name suggests to me a little blue Belgian gnome with a big white cap. But she doesn’t look like that at all. She’s a genial, jovial, intelligent sort of comic, who makes a good connection with the audience and picked on the right people with whom to have some decent banter. The dishwasher girls and the father-in-law/sons-in-law group gave good value, as did the inevitable comedy fans from Travis Perkins (IT department). She strayed a little into politics, but we’re not very interested in that kind of thing here. Sorry about that.

Our first act was Paul F Taylor, an innately funny guy with a great sense of the surreal and a fast attacking style. He stayed just on the right side of manic all the way through his material, which includes some pungent puns and shaggy dog stories. I liked his analogy that much of his set was like the middle aisle in Aldi, and really enjoyed his final sequence, where vending machines take on human identities. He went down well with the crowd, and I hope he comes back for more some time.

Second, and continuing the change to the advertised programme, we had the return of Karen Bayley, whom we have already seen three times, once as host and twice as the opening act. If you’ve not seen her before she is extremely funny with her self-deprecating, “desperate for sex” material, channelling all her desires to the youngest man in the front row, this time Chris, 26, who several times looked as though he wanted the earth to swallow him up. It’s all brilliantly funny, and the Sheriff thought she was sensational – but if I have a criticism, it is that Karen has more or less performed precisely the same routine four times now, and I reckon it’s time to shake the act up a little.

Final act was also someone we’ve seen twice before, and always enjoyed, Robert White. Looking extremely innocent, and gently knocking out some bontempi tunes on his keyboard, he uses his unique selling point combination of being gay and having Asperger’s syndrome to make up extremely funny, frequently saucy songs about all the members of the audience whose identities had been revealed by earlier comics. He usually discovers some rather straight-laced chap in the front to whom he starts singing explicit sex songs, and then in whom we all delight watching him squirm. But this time his first choice of target was gay and so that wasn’t going to work, then his second choice turned out to be someone who was equally happy to “take him on”, so to speak, so Mr White’s usually hilarious finale got scuppered. Nevertheless, it was great fun to witness it all fall apart in the most light-hearted of manners.