Come along my friends
said. Youll enjoy it! they said. And so it was, that quite
by chance I went to
the Hild and Bede Revue. Set against a whirl of end-of-term high jinks, my recollections
of it are both
hazy and distinct.
The warm-up act: two corpulent men,
brandishing pints of beer, appeared on stage cracking banal
one-liners whilst fetishising Bernard Manning with alarming facility. In the
midst of this, the appearance
of a laddish boffin in a lab coat inviting members of the audience to confess
indulgencies in various
sexual exploits, whilst exhibiting a delight in magic tricks.
From here on the Revue proper began,
inaugurated by the song Rowing is gay
a remarkable
send-up of the Village Peoples hit Y.M.C.A. - replete with
scantily-clad rowers. Other memorable
scenes were the brief Politically-Correct-Gay-Dad Sketch sketches
forming one of many running
jokes - and the transformation of a reticent public schoolboy into a bad-ass
Gangster Rapper. Homage
was paid to the domestic humour of Victoria Wood in a sketch involving two wizened
drudges
complaining about their inadequate marital lives, and although I cant
recall the particulars of the
rousing finale, I seem to remember it involved a lot of singing and leg waving.
Its a pity that the obvious
enthusiasm of the actors approach to this Revue didnt infect the
audience.
Clichéd, repetitious and inevitable punch lines were exacerbated by laboured
delivery and bad staging.
Influences, too, proved dangerous: where the humour was not derived from sources
like Channel 4s
11 Oclock Show, it slipped into the obscure.
A tad severe? Perhaps. It was mildly
amusing in places, but nothing to write home about. Choose your
friends wisely
Douglas Bertram