Rhod Gilbert Live

Such an epic disappointment

Before I get into reviewing the performance of Rhod Gilbert, along with his material on his new tour with an interesting name, I should explain my reasons for the comments later on in the review that you’ll probably disagree with. First off, I like Rhod Gilbert. Not just as a comedian but as a person too.

Granted I don’t know him personally, nor is he aware of my existence, but going by a show he did for BBC2 a while back where he took on occupations such as garbageman and hairdresser in order to show how difficult it actually is to do tasks we all assume are simple, I’d say he’s probably nice to hang around with and generally know as a friend. If anything, this show managed to invert my preconceived ideas about him.

For lack of a better description, Rhod Gilbert And The Cat That Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst is basically a Welsh man with an angry voice having a mental breakdown on stage whilst a room full of morons laugh at him. I went to see him doing the routine when they were filming it for the DVD, so consider this a fairly accurate sneak peak of his DVD that’ll probably be out for in time for Christmas.

If I ignore the warm-up act who was pathetic (I think his name was Andrew Burr or something), the jokes told in the first half were passable. We had an amusing section about Rhod trying to buy a hoover and getting irritated by the optional function of “variable suction power”, pointing out that it’s not like we’ve ever wanted to use anything lower than full power.

However, a fair portion of the jokes in the first half were taken from his previous DVD, Rhod Gilbert and the Award Winning Mince Pie. Luckily, I found the first DVD hilarious and I still think the whole tog-duvet gag is one of my favourite performances ever from a stand-up comedian (even better than “GARLIC BREAD?!?!”), so I suppose if you’ve seen the first DVD and enjoyed it then you’ll laugh your way through some of his jokes.

The thing is, surely if you’ve paid to see somebody do new jokes and tell new gags as advertised by the new tour, you’d want new bloody jokes. I could’ve stayed at home and watched the first DVD for this stuff – tell us a joke we don’t know Rhod! But it gets worse during the second half; not only is about a third of it from his first DVD but the rest of it is crap.

This is partly down to the audience. I don’t know whether it will be edited down in the DVD but the audience seemed to be one of those groups of people that will laugh at anything, and I mean anything! Rhod proved this by saying random things such as World War 2, only for the audience to laugh and for him to yell at them about how that isn’t funny.

There was a point when Rhod was talking about his experience in an anger management group and said, “Imagine being in a room filled with losers”. You have no idea how close I was to yelling back, “I don’t need to, I’m bloody living it”. Maybe in an alternate universe where I harboured a desire to get my head kicked in, I already did.

The performance seemed to go on for ages. I had to leave before the end in order to catch my train journey home, but I doubt that Rhod started telling crackers the second I left. When I was leaving, he was part way through some story about riding a horse with a broken neck. That was the level of comedy – it was worse than a pantomime.

You may think I’m over exaggerating, but Rhod himself made the connection to his show being like a pantomime. That was when the audience thought it would be hilarious to shout back “Oh no it isn’t!” They also went “Awwwwwwww” in unison whenever he said something sad, which managed to well and truly get on my tits. It wasn’t funny the first damn time, why the hell would it be funny the 20th?

But the worst thing, by a million miles, is the fact that I felt sorry for Rhod. The whole ‘angry Welsh man’ feels like his stage presence and persona that he puts on to get more laughs, but instead of watching an ordinary bloke pointing out the silly little things about ordinary life, we watched  a broken man telling us how depressing his life has been ever since he read all the bad reviews of his first (funny) DVD.

I know I’m not helping by giving the performance a strongly negative review, but he did it to himself. If he was trying a new persona in order to get more favourable reviews then he should’ve attempted something other than sitting on a stool and rambling on about his therapy, as if we were listening to a bi-polar man talking about his state of mind in order to stop him from killing himself.

In conclusion, Rhod’s first DVD is much better. If you’ve seen him on Mock The Week and like him, get the first DVD and completely ignore this one since it’s basically just the previous one with some rubbish jokes shoddily wedged in between.

In Award Winning Mince Pie, he tells jokes that are brilliantly constructed and executed, while in this routine his jokes usually involve boring and unamusing chat with the audience. In fact, the title of the tour should actually be “Rhod Gilbert & the Crowd and the Cat that looked like Nicholas Lyndhurst”.

I won’t ruin the meaning behind the title in case you do take a gamble and buy the DVD when it comes out (you’ll be sorry) but I will say that it’s nowhere near as satisfying as Award Winning Mince Pie. What a shame.