Review: Robin Ince @ Electric Cinema

Robin Ince: sociology lectures and spitting bile

In olden times – that’s the 1980s to you and me – Birmingham’s Electric Cinema used to be called the Tivoli. It was a tatty two-screener that offered film fans a choice between second-run Hollywood fare or old British sex comedies that always seemed to star Robin Askwith.

Nowadays, though, the venue is a bit more sophisticated. If you paid a visit to the revitalised picture palace during this year’s Birmingham Comedy Festival, for instance, you could choose between watching a top quality film on Screen One or a top quality stand-up act on Screen Two. And if you plumped for the second option you would have seen a smart, erudite, fiendishly funny man crawling across a stage littered with discarded newspapers while screaming obscenities about Natasha Kaplinsky.

Described by the Daily Telegraph as “a young Victor Meldrew crossed with a trendy sociology professor”, Robin Ince is one of the UK’s leading masters of cerebral stand-up. To put it another way, this is a comic who can quote from the works of Schopenhauer, Galbraith and Carl Sagan and still deliver on the funnies.

A summer festival regular with his Book Club (in which unlikely set texts would act as a springboard for some devastatingly funny improvisation), his set at the Electric – entitled Robin Ince vs The Moral Majority – employed a similar structure, only this time the catalyst for this bile-drenched powerhouse performance were some of our great nation’s major newspapers.

Although tabloids like the Daily Mail have provided political comics like Ince with reams of material in the past, with his new one-man show he fixed his forensic gaze on an altogether less obvious target: the so-called quality press.

Ince argued that the broadsheets were just as guilty of buying into the superficial celeb- and lifestyle-obsessed culture as the less illustrious tabloids, and cited a recent Guardian interview with Gordon Brown which seemed more concerned with his ‘peachy and fresh’ skin than it was with tackling him on the economy.

The investigative zeal of quality journalism has been replaced with lifestyle-fixated mediocrity, it seems, and the spirit of Woodward and Bernstein has been replaced with the spirit of Mills and Boon. As Ince took us through the unbelievably sycophantic text, his disbelief and indignation seem to grow exponentially with each line until they appeared ready to collapse in on themselves.

Of course, disbelief and indignation can often bring out the best in comics like Ince – like a stand-up version of The Incredible Hulk, the angrier he gets the funnier he gets – but few can channel exacerbated rage quite as precisely as he can. The most intense and savage vitriol, however, was saved for Natasha Kaplinsky. His starting point was a somewhat nauseating Sunday Times lifestyle feature on the glamorous newsreader which featured unintentionally cringe-worthy gems like:

“I am a bit of a honey connoisseur, and it has to be a Portuguese honey called Rosmaninho [rosemary], which a friend brings me.”

That may seem a fairly bland and innocuous statement to you, but to Ince every word contained a fossilised horror. He subsequently took a sledgehammer to every sickly sentence and purple passage, exposing a complex network of unspeakably twee subtexts and bourgeois presuppositions in the process.

This act of wanton deconstruction was like a general semantics lecture with dick jokes, made all the more funnier by Ince’s ferocious rage. By the end he was crawling across a stage littered with discarded newspapers while screaming obscenities about her.

As people departed, you couldn’t help but feel that there were a few in the audience who weren’t altogether impressed. Maybe they were Guardian readers who were expecting a predictable tirade against the Daily Mail, or maybe they were hoping for a top quality film and parked themselves at the wrong screen. They might even have gone to the venue expecting to see an old British sex comedy starring Robin Askwith.

Whatever the case, one thing’s for certain: they won’t be able to look at Natasha Kaplinsky in quite the same way again.

Review by Tom Lennon