CityLife

I Love Alan Carr @ Edinburgh Festival

THE first time I saw Alan Carr was an early gig in the City Life Comedian of the Year Competition. He blazed onto the stage and let fly with a torrent of camp ribaldry. It was the funniest thing I'd seen in a long while. And such a surprise too. When you don't recognise the name on the bill you sometimes make the prejudiced mistake of thinking they won't be any good.
Never more was that preconception proved wrong.

Unsurprisingly then, Carr's done very well in the intervening three years. He brought his first show to Edinburgh last year and follows it up with this year's I Love Alan Carr, both in amongst the plethora of shows in the Pleasance Courtyard.

"Last year I was in the attic now they've put me in the cellar," he opens mocking his surroundings with typical fey derision.

Carr follows on from last years show in chatty, one to one style. He's still at the call centre but sadly his lush of a housemate Monica has passed on to the great body-piercing studio in the sky.

He effortlessly moves from one seemly unrelated topic to the next, from the war on Channel 5 "When Bombs Go Wrong" to Guess Who?

Along the way he gives us some fantastic mental images of cats dragging their arses and of an early Carr on the checkout at Tesco's in Brent Cross making jokes with T'Pau's Carol Decker as she bought some new mugs (think about it).

Anxious to stay bang up to date and employing the skills he's learnt at the satirical MEN at Work night at the Comedy Store, Carr included a topical section. Though he proved to have a slight problem with his news headline style 'bongs' when his banker gongmeister picked out of the audience proved to be rubbish and was swiftly replaced.

So do we love Alan Carr? Yes of course we do. Long may he reign at the festival.