“Come along” my friends said. “You’ll 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 People’s 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 can’t recall the particulars of the
rousing finale, I seem to remember it involved a lot of singing and leg waving.

It’s a pity that the obvious enthusiasm of the actor’s approach to this Revue didn’t 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 4’s
11 O’clock 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