Comedy / Ed Byrne
Review: Ed Byrne, Colston Hall
“I’ve got a really big car. I’ve got a f**king massive trampoline, bigger than a flat. My kids are really f**king posh.” These three statements more or less sum up Ed Byrne’s Spoiler Alert, which was 90 minutes devoted – quoth Ed – to how spoiled we, as a society, have become.
In practice most of that 90 minutes was Ed talking about how spoiled he has become: in case you wondered, he lives in Saffron Walden, has a Volvo 4×4 called Violet and two kids called Cosmo and Magnus, all of which probably tells us everything we need to know.
Was he funny? Yes, kind of. Ed has always used his evolving middle-class lifestyle as fodder for his stand-up: the former working-class kid from Dublin whose dad used to leave him outside the pub while he got smashed, and whose only trampoline was the bottom bunk bed he’d jumped on and broken, but was too scared to tell his dad about. These sorts of stories, full of pathos as well as humour, work well. But I found the hour and a half spent waffling about his kids’ apartment-sized trampoline and their skiing holidays a bit hard to swallow.
is needed now More than ever
Is it actually true that we’ve all become spoilt and pampered? Because of course Ed was talking chiefly about himself, which is all very well. But in doing so he seemed to forget that, far from us all suffering from a gluttonous excess, there are more people than ever sleeping on the streets and using food banks, and most of them actually don’t have push-button SUVs.
Did anyone in the audience pay for a lecture on Britain’s social problems? No: but listening to Ed whine – albeit ironically – about the cost of his kids’ trip to Lapland didn’t feel like time well spent either (in fairness, the set might have been better suited to Milton Keynes, which Ed compared favourably – albeit, yes, ironically – to Bristol. Ha ha.)
Pics: Roslyn Gaunt
Ed is charming and affable, so it’s impossible not to like him, and there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (although for me these were mostly when he wasn’t talking about his massive cars). The audience seemed happy – and that’s what counts – and his unbidden encore, a rant against the the bankers and hedge-fund managers that make up his occasional premium gigs (presumably that’s how he can afford to raise kids called Cosmo and Magnus), was probably the best bit of the whole show.
No doubt it’s difficult to deliver edgy comedy once one is completely assimilated into the Aga-owning classes, and to his credit Ed gives it a good shot. But, for this reviewer, it missed the mark quite spectacularly.
Ed Byrne: Spoiler Alert Colston Hall Thur, March 8. For more Colston Hall comedy dates, visit www.colstonhall.org/whats-on/comedy
Read more: Interview: Suzi Ruffell
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