David Mulholland is a former Wall Street Journal hack and this is a show driven by the passion of a good journalist for getting the story right and a hatred of bad journalism and the Murdoch effect. Although billed as stand-up comedy, it is in effect a master class with jokes, about how to deconstruct the stories which appear in the likes of the Express and Mail, and also in how to get stories out of recalcitrant corporations without turning to phone hacking.
There’s some audience participation. We are read news items and get to vote on whether they are true, part-true or false. However, mostly we are led by the hand through the processes by which a map and a paper for an EU Conference in Rouen gets to the headlines (in the Express and Telegraph) to the effect of ‘EU set to abolish Britain’. Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn is a particular bête noire and subject to a gleeful hatchet job.
As a comic Mulholland isn’t quite in the first rank, either for delivery or timing, but his material and the rage behind it have a coherence and pacing which produces the goods. A timely and urgent show which puts a smile on your face and a great big question mark in your brain.
