CityLife

A STUNNED volunteer in the Buxton Opera House lobby tells me that tickets for The Mighty Boosh’s first north west shows are changing hands on eBay for a handsome £160.

Which is not quite as surprising as it sounds, because the Opera House has scored something of a golden goal with these gigs. It’s two months before Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt bring their surrealist comic creation to Manchester, and even then a fan’s best chance of catching them will be in the characterless surroundings of the MEN Arena.

Facing that prospect, a mixed gaggle of supporters have plumped for Buxton’s intimate old theatre. And it’s exactly the sort of place that typifies the comic friction between Barratt and Fielding’s alter egos; you can almost hear Howard Moon sniffing in the smell of grease paint while Vince Noir comments on the ‘well vintage’ boutique décor.

Three series and one live show into life as The Boosh, and the question on everyone’s lips is where they go from here.

The narrative of this latest live performance shows that Fielding and Barratt have had some of the same concerns, and coherence is often left on the back burner in favour of giving the love in the room some space to swell. 

Cheeky grin

And there is plenty of love. All is takes is a cheeky grin from Fielding to get the whole room hollering these days – evidence, if you needed it, that the men behind this once cult BBC3 comedy are now bona fide superstars writing stadium-filling entertainment.

The transition shows a little in the structure of the new stage version, too. The first half acts as a sort of refresher course on the show’s hit characters – the crack fox, the hitcher, Bob Fossil, Naboo The Shaman, The Moon and Tony Harrison, now a Michael Parkinson-style chat show host, steal their five minutes each – and there’s notable progress in the show’s polish with the addition of a live band and shiny set.

Conversely, the second half taps into the storytelling techniques that sustained the concept through three series: bizarre, leftfield and full of ‘tiny twisties’, and not a million miles away from their early Hen & Chickens material.

This time, Howard is allowed to indulge his lofty am-dram aspirations and pen a pompous, apocalyptic play set in 2009 about the destruction of the planet – from which he (unsurprisingly) is the only survivor that isn’t left hideously malformed.

Delicous pokes

 There’s some delicious pokes at amateur theatre as Noir and The Boosh’s talking ape, Bollo, wave around pieces of red and blue fabric to represent fire and water and cheap props are wheeled awkwardly on and off stage.

 It takes flight, though, when Vince Noir breaks off script and blasts Moon’s bleak vision with a skip-full of glitter, emerging as Sunflash, a winged gladiator in the shortest of gold lame skirts, from the “future future” who speaks in his own dialect of ‘Chavese’ – a mixture of Chinese and chav.

 Like an Ernie Wise ‘play what I wrote’, it’s on a par with the Eels or Nanageddon TV episodes for testing the imagination, but it’s also full of peachy one-liners: “Leeds is a state of mind,” chirps Howard when his gaggle of freaks ask him where he is from, and then there’s Noir’s typically vacuous closing thought on the moral of his rebellious tale: “If you look a bit strange,” he replies, “learn to accessorize."

Crimping style

As always, though, the best moments are the front-of-curtain verbal spas between Howard and Vince: Moon the Stuckist jazz lover, Noir the fashionista with the upper hand.

His Kings Of Leon impression and the duo’s crimp about the recent Sugar Puffs advert that mimicked their crimping style are both rib-aching moments. 

They close with a musical set from the Nanageddon stars and the Boosh live band, the Ungrateful Dead, turning the exquisite theatre into a bouncing gig. Which is probably the only way to sign off for the night when you’re comedians that are worshipped like rock stars.

The Mighty Boosh play Manchester Apollo and MEN Arena from December 1-6. Tickets are still available for some shows.

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