Peter Brush Archives - The Real Chrisparkle

A slightly odd night of comedy with the Comedy Crate at the Bradlaugh on Thursday, with a hit and miss line-up and a curiously under energised audience. Our host for the night was Jesus lookalike Jay Handley, whom we saw at the British Comedian of the Year heat at the very same venue last year, when he was a huge hit. This time, he started the show with some curiously misplaced material about the homeless which I think took some of us aback. He was on firmer ground with chatting to audience members, including Jack the folk/blues band manager, and creating a mock argument about the worthiness of the charities that two different audience members worked for, only to discover they were married, leading to a delightfully embarrassed reaction sequence.

Our first act was Peter Brush, whom we’d seen once before at a Screaming Blue Murder night seven years ago and enjoyed, although I thought his act might turn out to be a little underpowered for the audience. How wrong I was – he absolutely smashed it, in the modern vernacular. Mr Brush is a retiring, quiet-looking, young-fogey type, who packs a brilliant punch with his unexpected punchlines. Beautifully self-deprecating and deliciously misleading, story after story landed perfectly showing that being mild-mannered does not result in bland comedy. I particularly loved his observations about Essex girls, turning a stereotype on its head to terrific comic effect, and his hilarious routine about what you can do with a toaster. First class!

Next up was someone new to us, Jenny Hart. Here’s where things start to get tricky. To accentuate the positive, she has a strong stage presence, excellent comic timing and is clearly a naturally funny person. She’s an out and proud transwoman – quite right too! – and integrates every aspect of that as an essential part of her routine. However, her material was not at all my cup of tea. I really don’t think I’m a prude, but I found the content of her set very crude, somewhat aggressive, and often in very dubious taste, with a couple of stories that I thought were totally unsuitable for sharing. Maybe I was way too sensitive for her material; to be fair, on the few occasions where she delivered some throwaway lines unrelated to her pre-prepared material, she made me laugh a lot. The chap in front of me absolutely loved her, and there were a few sections of the audience who were laughing riotously at her. But I’m afraid I couldn’t wait for it to end.

Our headliner was Jordan Brookes, also new to us, and what an unpredictable nugget of comedy gold he is! Breaking all the established rules by discarding the microphone, sitting among the audience, dragging a chair around the stage for every purpose apart from sitting on it, his is a fresh, constantly surprising, anarchic style, but never alienating us from either his material or his personality. As to that material, he’s one of those extraordinary performers whom you love to see and laugh at everything he says – and then the next day, you can’t remember one word of it. It’s a great way of ensuring you want to see him again! A superb ending to a slightly lopsided night of comedy.

More Comedy Crate gems to come next week when they take over V&B’s wine bar in Northampton on Tuesday. Can’t wait!

We’ve been a bit on-off with our Screaming Blue attendances this season, as other juicy sounding shows had been up for sale before the Screaming Blue dates were announced. But at least we were free for this one. Unfortunately, our regular host Dan obviously wasn’t, and we were treated to a replacement host for the night in the shape of Mr James Sherwood, whom we’d seen once before and enjoyed his act.

It’s the task of the compere to get us punters nicely warmed up for the first act. Unfortunately, no matter which tack Mr Sherwood took, it ended up as a dead end. We weren’t particularly responsive as a group, and his questioning line of “who’s had a nice day” just didn’t elicit the right kind of engagement. Things took a turn hugely for the better between the first and second acts though, when he reverted to his usual act and simply sat at the keyboard and played funny songs from a grammatically pedantic point of view. That was great. He also attempted some political humour, but we didn’t bite – we don’t normally do political humour here in Northampton. That said, simply mentioning the words “Michael Gove” isn’t really political humour.

So, on to our acts proper. First up, and new to us, was Caroline Mabey. She was at a disadvantage because at that stage we weren’t properly warmed up, but she seemed bright and breezy enough. Somehow, somewhere into the act we all realised that it wasn’t quite working, but Caroline kept on with gritty determination to get through it as best she could. I think the problem was that she adopts an “I’m mad, me!” type of persona but I don’t think that’s really who she is, so it comes over as rather forced instead of natural. Her voice and mannerisms are those of the bastard love child of Mel Giedroyc and Frankie Howerd, and I wouldn’t see that relationship ever getting off the ground. It was all a bit painful but we all got through it in the end.

Second act, and also new to us, was Peter Brush. A complete opposite to Caroline in many respects, because he too adopted a persona – that of a nerdy fish out of water – but you completely believed that that’s exactly how he is in real life. He paced his act beautifully, mined each moment for its full laughter quotient and above all had some marvellous material. With a surname like that, he must have been called “Daft-as-a” at school.

Final act, and someone we had seen once before, was Jonny Awsum. He was very good then but this time he completely smashed it, as common parlance would have it. He just comes out on stage and the mere sight of him makes you happy. His mix of comedy and music works brilliantly, and you are powerless to resist joining in and making silly noises to accompany his songs. It would be too much to hope that he really does rejoice in the surname “Awsum”.