Harry Hill displays a talent mainly to bemuse
There are two Harry Hills. The first is the one on TV, the talking head behind big glasses and a bigger collar; the wacky voice that, for 18 years, has talked over people giving themselves third-degree burns on You’ve Been Framed.
The other Hill is the surreal stage act, adored by critics and fellow comics, defiantly flying the flag for nonsense since the early 90s, a time when his peers were pushing the idea of stand-up as social commentary.
We haven’t seen much of the latter Hill lately – it’s almost 10 years since his last stand-up tour – but his children are everywhere. Comedy in the past decade has seen a revival of pure daftness; the deliciously silly likes of Olaf Falafel, Spencer Jones and Josh Glanc all stand on Hill’s shoulders. I love their stuff, and was expecting to love Hill’s Pedigree Fun tour, too. But after only two proper laughs in as many hours, I left more bemused than amused.
I wasn’t alone in this. Guildford’s crowd seemed unusually muted, though the acoustics didn’t help. G Live, a vast, high-ceilinged concert hall, is better suited to Mozart’s Requiem than rib-tickling slapstick.
On paper, Pedigree Fun has everything: stand-up, prop comedy, songs, dances, games, videos and a vomiting ventriloquist’s dummy, all delivered with great energy by a man willing to work up a sweat for his craft. So what’s missing?
There’s a scene in the Gormenghast books where Steerpike, the chilly anithero, pretends to be “a clown, a living limb of nonsense”. This act requires “something simple and guileless, and it was this that Steerpike found difficult… he was almost entirely cerebral in his approach… All the time he was thinking. ‘What a fool I am, but it will work.’ He could not sink himself.”
Behind the farce, there’s something cool and methodical about the man formerly known as Dr Matthew Hall MD, a cardiologist who keeps his own heart hidden. Even when he’s rolling around on the floor in a six-meter-long sock, Hill never sinks himself. He wants you to be impressed, to appreciate the work.
He rattles off the titles of 50 songs beginning with “L” in exact alphabetical order, as a set-up for a groanworthy punchline, then does the same with “M” for no punchline at all. It’s a great feat of memory, but not great comedy. The same is true of the moment when, in the middle of a shaggy dog story about a defecating squirrel, he recites the entirety of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. In Guildford, that poem was met with near-silence, then a smattering of polite applause.
There are sparks of something better in the more straightforward stand-up segments; an ironic riff about how things were better in the 70s makes the most of Hill’s persona. He’s a man out of time. Sometimes it’s charming, in a show that opens with a Donovan spoof, nods to Tomorrow’s World, and features a winningly off-colour recurring gag about “the smells of China”. Sometimes it’s rather less charming: a gag – in 2022 – about David Blunkett’s physique hinges on the phrase “blind man’s buff”. There are lots of cute animal-videos, the kind of things your aunt might have forwarded you via email in 2011.
Promising bits are overstretched, as if to wring every last possible laugh from them. A slideshow-based game called “Traybake or tear’n’share?” seems to take up roughly 500 of this show’s 120 minutes. By the interval, I was regretting my choice to do Sober October. My medical advice for anyone considering an appointment with Dr Hill: a stiff drink might help.
Touring until Jan 29; harryhilltour.com
