I once had to perform a speech in front of my primary school class on the subject of “Art”. Great, that’s not abstract or subjective enough for a 9 year old. I’d recently moved to this school in the Isle of Man from Southern Ireland so knew nobody and wasn’t fitting in well. Typical example of an everyday faux pas: For ‘colouring in time’, I crayoned the skin of a farmer – brace yourself for this – yellow instead of pink! Shock! Horror! My simple tiny child brain thought that ‘Buttercup Yellow’ was closer to the shade of Caucasian blue collar human skin than the utterly racist ‘Heap Big Injun Pink’ of my contemporaries. Cue ridicule from tiny bastards and surely-should-know-better teacher. My speech that afternoon was more stilted, awkward and intermittent than a stuttering Tourettes-suffering 80’s buddy movie robot whose arch nemesis had comically uploaded a ‘Tee-Hee Sound-like-a-Scared-Tranny 2.0’ embarrassment file straight to my metallic pointy bonse.
Russell Howard’s Tough Gig is a programme about Russell Howard performing a comedy stand up routine in front of a tough crowd. A tough crowd. Notice the italics for added drama. For me, this notion conjures up these examples: 1) Lenny Henry in front of the BNP after England lose a football match to Cameroon. 2) Ant on Dec’s shoulders dressed as Harold Shipman in front of a crowd of grieving relatives. 3) A teen emailing North Korea the message “U R gay h0m0 wiv girly spac b0mbs lol”.
Russell Howard had to perform in front of – cue bombastic drums and ladies swooning – some surf dudes in Ireland. Not furious apes whilst covered in bananas and the flesh of ape wives. No, just some jovial, constantly smiling friends that love to surf. Beforehand to create tension, did the production team show the surfers polariods of Russell secretly rubbing his winky with their toothbrushes or 3-waying their mums and sisters atop a mosaic depicting blindfolded surfers being shot and their boards being pooed on? No. They all got to hang out together for a week, surfing, laughing, eating, chuckling, boozing, jumping off cliffs, patting each other on the back and laughing.
So basically, Russell Howard’s Tough Gig involved Russell making new friends, whose chuckle factor was already on level 9, who surfing in storm conditions at 5am hungover after an hours’ sleep can still laugh about farting, laugh.
Well say it ain’t so, Russell heroically beats these overwhelming odds and gets genuine laughs. The fact this ITV programme was about 25 minutes long after adverts, and his set was about 6 minutes long, is here nor there.
A previous episode featured walking cheeky-Oirish-chappie stereotype Patrick Kielty. He actually had a reasonably tough gig in front of some rough London geezers. Tough because he’s annoying and Irish, and they’re street and Laandaan, innit. Again, because he got to spend time getting to know his crowd, the gig went well.
To improve the programme, I suggest adding a Wife Swap element. I.e. get the comedians to live with their absolute polar opposite counterpart for a week to create maximum hatred, er I mean friction. Alan Carr could stay with the editor if The Daily Mail for example. He could dress as Princess Diana and act out a lengthy rape by an asylum seeker for the duration of his set. Or maybe Rolf Harris could live with some Native Americans and for the gig stubbornly refuse to communicate with them in any way other than painting them as fire engine red Rolferoos. That’d be pretty tough.
