I feel I should preface this 'reaction' by referencing a bit Romesh starts with. He talks about the audience not wanting to be there. They booked the tickets over a year ago then forgot about them and now one person reminds the other they've got Romesh tonight and the other person sighs. It was funny because it was true. I wasn't up for a good night. I'd had a busy day (week) at work and just wanted to close my eyes and wake up after my extra hour's sleep post-BST.
Jen Brister, the support act, did twenty minutes which did little to change this view. She was supposed to warm up the audience for Romesh but the sell-out crowd's bodies were already doing that. My eyes were heavy and I did my best to stay awake but I did occasionally slip into listening mode. My first impression of her was how she resembled a thin Mark Owen (of Take That). Her material covered topics like her twins, being a 'lezzer' and labiaplasty. I didn't rate her but that was probably my fault more than hers due to my tiredness.
Our seats behind the sound desk in the circle gave me a good view, but my smaller wife (not that I have other wives of differing sizes) could have used a booster seat to see over the raised balcony. She had to sit forward in her seat to see. It also became frustrating every time the sound engineer walked to the front of his booth and we got his wild-haired silhouette obstructing our view. A reminder not to book those particular seats again.
Romesh can be predictable with his comedy but that doesn't stop it being funny. He talked about his kids, his wife, being a vegan, racism at the football and the public opinion of Michael Jackson post-paedo scandal. In the second half, he also covered his health, his sex life (his brown sausage, sorry, chipolata) and family holidays. He admits he is lazy (despite being on a multitude of tv programmes) so we know he's going to make reference to his wonky eye, his mum and being brown. We know he's going to say something scurrilous then counter it with an 'I'm kidding' then flip it with 'I'm not'. It's his schtick. He gave us what we expected and laughed all the way to the bank.
He played well off the audience. One woman who laughed loudly like the wicked witch of the west whenever he wasn't speaking prompting him to imagine she was sitting there listening on headphones to a Michael Macintyre gig. This was followed by a spot-on impression of MM's reaction to a 'man-drawer'. Nicely improvised.
I enjoyed the end (not just because I got to go home). The encore had him rapping, which was different but still in character with his love of hip hop. Then, as he walked off stage, the outro music was 'Earth Song' by Michael Jackson. It was a lovely surprise callback to his first-half material and it made me smile. So perhaps it wasn't that bad a night out after all.
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