Lasy year’s Perrier best newcomer award nominee returns with another show

Lasy year’s Perrier best newcomer award nominee returns with another show built around a slender scientific premise, diagrams and whimsy. Horne’s delivery style is very deadpan and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine him as a young hotshot leading a sales seminar either in real life or in a sitcom that has been written with him in mind. Not that he is boring, more understated.Horne is an engaging host and this makes for an enjoyable hour, which is not so much Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out as Alex Horne’s Gentle Hour Before Midnight, although predictably there are comedians leading a backlash against “gizmo gags” – the technologically assisted laughter of the Dave Gorman school. Nevertheless, the cute graphics and deft touches certainly have charm, such as the morphing of a repetition of body language rules into a Kraftwerk-style pop tune.It is true that the choreography between comic and machine means that the old-fashioned punchline takes a back seat, but what fills the space provided by that here is highly entertaining.. Drag queen Bernice Hindley inhabits Glasgow’s violent and unforgiving gay underworld.

Russell Barr performs his own show, Sister, Such Devoted Sisters, with such sheep-eyed, heartfelt conviction that you imagine it all to be horribly true. Bernice/Barr flutters her eyelashes, flicks her blonde hair, rearranges her shapely legs and sips tea, calmly regaling us with anecdotes.Exploding pigeons, hearses supplied instead of wedding cars, Jack Russell terriers at the wheel of a car are comparatively innocent; relatives who cannot be named “for legal reasons” are not. Referred to simply as Mr or Mrs Puppy, their habits range from shop-lifting to paedophilia and pornography, intercut with seamy tales from the city: sex with the fraud squad boss, sadism on the streets and surreal experiences with offal.As Barr slips between the mundane, the humorous and the horrific, he pauses meaningfully, as if to emphasise or reflect on the shocking element of some of his material. It is not always a comfortable 45 minutes but it is vivid, compelling and realistically presented.. Apart from George Bush Snr, who famously lamented, “We need a nation closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons,” it seems that the whole world is a Bart fan. There is thus a guaranteed audience for the voice of Bart, Nancy Cartwright, appearing in what, on the surface, is by far the most attractive of the “Me shows” that proliferate at this year’s Fringe festival. What follows is a quick journey through Cartwright’s life and career as well as a sketching of The Simpsons’ progress since it began on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987 when Bart looked like he would be even more at home hanging with Beavis and Butthead and Homer sounded like James Stewart.Cartwright never allows you to become bored but that means some issues are skirted over faster than American closing credits on television.

You never really get a feel what it is like recording the show. Yes, it’s nice to know that Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer), Harry Shearer (the voice of Montgomery Burns and Principal Skinner) and the gang are great to work with, but where are the anecdotes? Yes, the best thing about The Simpsons is its brilliant ability to tackle difficult issues, often encapsulating them in a line, but then at least remind us of this, don’t just nod to it.There is a wholesome quality to this show at odds with The Simpsons phenomenon; while the television series works on different levels, this show is straight down the line Bart Simpson is an irreverent, mischievous little boy. Nancy Cartwright is an enthusiastic, rather saccharine, woman (but with a little girl trapped inside). Of course she knows her character inside out and when Bart’s voice comes from within (and there is a touch of The Exorcist about this skill) she knows exactly what he would say in a given situation. However, what Bart would make of Nancy dancing round the stage to M C Hammer was wisely left unsaid. The similarity between the television show and Cartwright’s stage show is that they are both accessible and broken up into digestible chunks. Cartwright has a lot of ground to cover, and she handles certain elements very well.Without wishing to be cynical, it seemed that the story of how a celebrity helped a terminally ill child to die happy might not be far away, but when it came it was moving, dignified and genuinely felt.

You cannot help but be impressed with the devotion The Simpsons engenders. Within this show there was a brief quiz where Simpsons geeks were asked the most obscure questions before one delighted winner literally skipped off with some merchandise. That kind of fan will love the show whatever but neither they nor anyone else will leave feeling much the wiser about Bart and his iconic family.. It’s noon outside the Barnes & Noble book store in the Rockefeller Center, New York, and a queue stretches down 48th Street from Fifth Avenue all the way to the Avenue of the Americas An elderly couple pause in front of the store. “What’s going on?” asks the wife, a diminutive, myopic woman, screwing up her face in puzzlement She spots the poster in the window nearest the door. “Is Tommy Franks here today?” The retired general smiling back at her is not on hand to sign copies of his autobiography.