8:33am Tuesday 14th July 2009
By Emma Clayton
With his floppy fringe and public school accent, it was kind of inevitable that Michael McIntyre would touch on the North/South divide during his evening in Bradford.
After the ‘hole in the ground’ gag – “You ripped down your shopping centre and forgot to re-build it. I believe you’re optimistically calling it a garden centre now” – he moved on to bemusement at northern nuances.
“Does your currency still have ‘bob’ here, as in ‘that’s worth a bob or two’?” he asked.
One of McIntyre’s strengths is picking up on a nugget of information from an audience member and turning it into a line.
He missed a trick though with a woman who told him she was called Anne from Haworth which, let’s face it, could’ve given him a good five minutes of Bronte gags. He confessed he’d never heard of Haworth, the North/South divide working against him that time.
He came up against a feeble heckle or two from the usual surly, arms-folded Bradford audience member, but overall the packed-out crowd seemed delighted with the nation’s hottest comic.
Like Peter Kay, he has a universal appeal – there were children, middle-aged couples and pensioners among the students – and his material was largely inoffensive, relying on observational yarns and physical comedy, delivered with middle-class charm. Highlights included a hilarious routine about confronting a burglar after waking up with ‘dead arms’, getting trapped in an Irish ladies’ loo, and calling for an end to our pretence of knowing about wine – “I forgot my wife’s birthday, how am I supposed to know 1992 was a good year for grapes?”
Along the way he turned into everything from a camp personal shopper to a West Country sandwich-maker, to a whole hierarchy of kitchen herbs and spices, with salt and pepper sitting regally on the table while the others are crammed in a cupboard, with paprika musing that the closest he came to getting a life was when “I fell out once.”
You’ve got to love a comic who can get a laugh out of paprika.
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