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Austerity BingeAt Last, The 1981 Show ★★★

Nostalgic appeal ... The Greatest Show on Legs perform at At Last! The 1981 Show at Royal Festival Hall, London. Photograph: Marilyn Kingwill

By Bruce Dessau in Guardian.co.uk Posted on Monday, May 30th, 2011

When photographs of David Cameron’s new kitchen were publicised last week, the eagle-eyed identified a Michael McIntyre DVD on the PM’s shelves. But standup comedy wasn’t always so cosy with the mainstream. At Last! The 1981 Show, curated by Stewart Lee as part of his Austerity Binge mini-festival, marks 30 years since the alternative comedy generation stuck a firework up the backside of British entertainment. This was comedy’s punk moment, and tonight, a populous bill of ageing comics intermittently revived its iconoclastic thrill.

Youthful iconoclasm, of course, is hard to reanimate at three decades’ distance. But neither are these comics inclined to reminisce and self-congratulate. So the show sometimes fell between stools, with several acts neither recalling nor recreating what first made them great. Nigel Planer, reprising his Young Ones hippy Neil, sings two ropey songs on acoustic guitar, but not his 1984 hit Hole in My Shoe. (Planer is funnier as his thespian alter ego, Nicholas Craig.) And co-host Alexei Sayle, when he is not sending up the show’s celebratory agenda (“A lot has changed since I invented alternative comedy”), refuses to perform standup at all.

But, even as compere, Sayle’s dissenting spirit is satisfyingly to the fore. He is not alone, either: Pauline Melville’s Edie the Radical Housewife contributes some good old-fashioned Tory-bashing, and cabaret troupe the Greatest Show on Legs – one of the show’s anarchic high points – perform their butt-naked balloon dance. Elsewhere on an eccentric bill (which has no place for Lee’s bete noire Ben Elton), Andrew Bailey as Lenin rants about muesli and Kevin McAleer reaps minimalist deadpan comedy from a photograph of four owls.

Despite the show’s refusal to get sentimental, nostalgia remains part of its appeal – at least to those of us reared on The Young Ones and Saturday Live. They may generate more smiles than big laughs, but it is a pleasure to see acts such as the latterday vaudevillians The Oblivion Boys (Stephen Frost and Mark Arden) reunited, and Norman Lovett meander through a delightfully droopy 10 minutes of non-sequitur comedy. The finale sees Kazuko Hohki’s art-pop collective Frank Chickens crowd the stage with dancing Japanese women and one tall Irishman. It is funny by dint of its chutzpah and sheer improbability. It is also unlikely ever to feature in the PM’s DVD collection, which is entirely to its credit.

Written by Bruce Dessau in Guardian.co.uk on 30th May 2011. Filed Under: At Last The 1981 Show, Austerity Binge
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