CityLife Rating
Clive James in the Evening
AS if Elbow hadn’t gained enough new fans in the last couple of years, they can count a new one among them.
Clive James no less, who spent a chunk of the opening section of his show telling us why he had chosen their Mercury Prize winning album The Seldom Seen Kid as his run-in CD.
Though he almost didn’t make it to pop the disc in the hi-fi tray and eulogise about the album at all as a large chunk of the beginning of the first half of the show concerned an off-the-cuff depiction of his run in with Virgin trains on the way up from Euston.
The end result was the biggest cab fare of this life (aren’t we glad he’s not a politician).
Engaging narrative
Talking of expenses of course elsewhere in the set he can’t resist a dig at the topic du jour - MP’s expenses and Hazel Blears in particular are covered in the opening section too - further evidence of how he can weave an engaging narrative in the space of… well no time at all really.
The comedic gift - like those currently being served up by the government and their opposition - was discussed in James’ deconstruction of the comedy itself.
Lamenting the loss of George Bush to the art of stand-up, he covers familiar ground in lampooning the former president but does it with aplomb.
Not that he counts himself as a stand-up and demonstrates the fact by deftly showing how easy he finds it to fluff up the telling of a gag.
Gentle ribbing
Though a fine joke about Bill Clinton later on begs to differ. That said we must quibble with his assertion that comedians don’t write their own jokes, that may have been the case a few years back but these days the vast majority do and if they do employ writers they tend to co-write with them.
James’ native land of Australia – the country he left in 1961 for England - comes in for some gentle ribbing as ever plus there are some unsubtle but good natured plugs for his books of memoirs, prose and his particular passion, poetry.
If the rest of his verse is as poignantly beautiful as When We Were Kids, the poem that he reads to close the show ,then they’re well worth checking out.
Reviewed: Fri, 05 June, 2009
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