an evening of sporadically acclaimed comedy

We have just been to see Andy Zaltzman at the Colchester Arts Centre.  To quote their brochure, the undisputed, sporadically acclaimed comedian is a star of The Bugle podcast and Radio Four's Political Animal.  I got the tickets months ago when I saw his name on the arts centre website, long before the brochure came out, because the Systems Administrator is a big Bugle fan.  To judge from Zaltman's doleful predictions in a recent podcast I needn't have bothered, according to the SA, since plenty of tickets were going to be available on the door.

In fact, the turnout was quite respectable.  The room was nowhere near full, and Andy Zaltzman made a quip about how his career wasn't going that well or they'd have put out more chairs at the back of the room, but I've been to folk gigs with smaller audiences.  Although I suppose that counting your fan base in the same league as folk musicians that nobody has heard of rather than in comparison to Michael McIntyre is an admission of relative failure as a comedian.

I'm not a Bugle listener, nothing against The Bugle, but I don't do podcasts.  I can't work out when to listen to them, when I do so much of my radio listening outside on my mud spattered and incredibly battered garden digital radio, and can't stand wearing headphones.  But the bits of Bugle quoted to me by people who do listen sounded promising, and anyway I was prepared to take their word for it that Andy Zaltzman would be funny.  Likewise to take the risk that he might not be my cup of tea.  As risks go, taking the risk that you might be moderately bored or embarrassed for a couple of hours maximum isn't the greatest.

Luckily I didn't have to suffer either, as I thought he was funny too.  The format of his tour, which I hadn't managed to discover before we got to the arts centre, was that audience members nominate things for him to satirize.  Since I didn't know, I obviously hadn't sent in any ideas.  He asked who had sent in a suggestion, and a few hands went up.  Who had meant to suggest something and not got round to it?  Rather more hands went up.  That, he told us sternly, was why democracy didn't work.  He took ideas from the floor as well, five minutes before starting the show, and punctiliously tackled every one of them, though he did jump off pretty quickly from some of the less promising ones into riffs on other topics that he'd probably worked up previously.  But I could scarcely expect anybody to compose an entirely new hour's worth of material based on a ragbag of found ideas in five minutes flat.

As a forty year old, white, middle class man, privately educated at enormous expense, who had never had a proper job, Andy Zaltzman should clearly be in the Cabinet, and the only reason why he's not must be antisemitism.  That gives a flavour of his act, and I won't attempt to type out the rest from memory.  There were some Bugle catch-phrases, which I knew from the SA, too soon, too soon muttered in response to an audience mention of Jimmy Savile.  Which is a good get out, since Savile jokes would be fabulously distasteful.  The SA tells me he read Classics at Cambridge, and his wife is a high powered lawyer.  When he is not writing political satire he compiles cricket statistics.  The SA was worried that I might not like Andy Zaltzman, but I'm glad I stuck to my guns and got the tickets.  We didn't stay behind to buy any merchandise, because the SA already has The Bugle mug.