Review: Jonathan Pie, The Lantern

You may have stumbled across Jonathan Pie’s videos on social media or YouTube.  The premise is that he’s a BBC political correspondent, and the clips are his open and frank comments once the recording has finished but the camera is still running: a Socratic dialogue with his earpiece in which Pie surgically and expletively deconstructs the flaws, cant and unchallenged falsehoods in modern politics.

So how do you transfer a character comedy act which is entirely video-based to the stage? The starting point for Pie’s stage show is that he’s presenting links for Children in Need in front of a live Bristol crowd. In between toe-curling high-energy celebrations of Gloria Hunniford sitting in a bath of baked beans and raptures over big cheques to camera, his off-air time is spent talking to the audience in a series of splenetic asides which rip into the multiple defects of our political system. 

The stage show fleshes out more of Pie’s personal life – his failed marriage, his sense of frustration at not being able to achieve ‘something’. There is pathos which is unavoidably reminiscent of Alan Partridge, but without Partridge’s overweening sense of misplaced self-confidence. Pie is a far more likeable character than Partridge, and there is a touching depth to his characterisation. But primarily he is a vehicle for vocalising the unexpressed anger felt by so many people who fall somewhere between the Mail and the Guardian.

With a Tory government, Brexit and Trump, Pie has plenty to spill his bile over. There are shades of Mark Thomas and Ben Elton when he still did “a little bit of politics”. Yet alongside the progressive diatribes against the Tories and their assault on so many things that we value, Pie reserves special bitterness for ‘the Left’. “I’m a Guardian reader,” he admits. “That means I can afford to spend £2 a day to read opinions I already agree with.” But he then proceeds to rip into the general unwillingness amongst many on the liberal left to really engage with and take seriously views that challenge their own, preferring to opt for a self-enriching sense of moral superiority. It may not be the most comfortable argument, but it gets the biggest cheer of the evening.

Jonathan Pie’s show lies somewhere between a comedy set and a political rally. There are plenty of laughs, but there are also plenty of depressing, enraging facts: like the statistic that income inequality has consistently increased every year under the Tories. And there is a clear message about engagement with others, about not simply dismissing people who think differently to us as ‘bigots’ or ‘stupid’. In a time when politics has lost any sort of rudder and a lot of progressives have decided to hole up in their safe space, this comedian may well be helping to shape some sort of viable populist response from the left. And he makes good jokes whilst he does it.

Jonathan Pie was at The Lantern on Wednesday, November 16. For more Lantern/Colston Hall comedy lineups, visit www.colstonhall.org/whats-on/comedy