Tired of playing soulless corporate gigs and run-of-the-mill crowd pleasers at the weekend, Geoff Norcott is taking the plunge with this show, his first where he talks about what he wants to talk about, instead of what he is told to say or feels he has to say. Used to doing ‘bearpit gigs’, he tells the festival crowd good-naturedly ‘the only fight you lot would get in is if someone spilled your latte’. While this may sound romantic and precious, Norcott in this show does a lot to prove his aptitude with this change in style, even if, occasionally, he does ‘sell out’.
Norcott is, if nothing else, a completely fearless comedian: to come on stage in Scotland and choose your support of the conservatives and English patriotism as two of your main subjects takes balls. This is all part of him trying his hand at a more intellectual style of comedy, or, as he puts it rather succinctly ‘comedy with arching narratives and lots of syllables’. To be honest, I don’t see why he wasn’t doing this in the first place, as he clearly has a talent for it: stories interlink both narratively and comedically and Norcott’s impersonations and various voices make them come alive in a way that many others fail to pull off. A charming, lovable cockney accent is twinned with a clearly sharp and intelligent mind, as Norcott talks us through why he votes blue and thinks that pensioners should have less funding from the state (see? Fearless). He makes rather a good case for his claims as well, managing to balance on a difficult tightrope of stating what might be an unpopular opinion, but doing so in an understandable and reasonable way.
The irony in this show is that, for Norcott, these are unknown waters and the comedian is aiming to become more than a mere club comedian. However, in today’s comedy landscape, the genre he has fallen into is somewhat overpopulated itself. That said, Norcott’s ambition to merge his comedy clubbing with a more specialised style goes some way to making him stand out. He tells a story about how, when he threatened to walk out of a corporate gig that was going poorly, he was offered and accepted triple pay. The point is, while it’s all very well to have romantic ideals and aspire to a higher standard, Norcott’s history with the more highly produced style of comedy and his love for it means that it’s okay to sell out occasionally. A well thought out, well presented and very funny show.
