Shanay Holmes and the cast of Oliver! with Cameron Mackintosh (Image: Getty)
One of the great joys of the Royal Variety Performance is spotting the yawning gulf between the gales of laughter that greet the feeblest of jokes and the cutaways of a clearly unimpressed audience.
The highest-billed comedian Ellie Taylor came out and had a cosy chat about her waters breaking. Hmm. I don’t dislike Ellie, but she’s no Marti Caine; much less Victoria Wood.
The Royal was a real event once; a genuine variety show, it had a first half headliner and built to a huge climax with a big-name bill-topper. Now it just peters out.
ITV view it primarily as a schedule filler to promote West End shows (although the extract from Elton’s The Devil Wears Prada might have had the opposite effect).
There were magic moments of course, but the dead hand of mediocrity was never far away. Having such hapless hosts didn’t help. Alan Carr’s awkward pairing with made you think kindlier of Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood.
Carr – still unforgiven for desecrating Bullseye – sounds like an aging fishwife struggling with a new set of false teeth. Anyone setting out to list Holden’s talents can rule out comic repartee.
The Royal Albert Hall is an odd venue for a night whose natural home is the London Palladium. Most of the audience wouldn’t have seen Stephen Mulhern’s low-key magic tricks without binoculars. They didn’t miss much. ITV’s promise of “astonishing illusions” amounted to a beginner’s class in stunts – the torn-up and restored newspaper, disappearing liquid – plus bog-standard lady-vanishes levitation.
Even the great Penn & Teller disappointed. Their brief spot was just a jazzed-up version of the old signed-card-to-sealed-envelope trick, here involving Vanessa Williams’s credit card and several secured boxes.
Sticking with Vegas acts, the Cirque du Soleil troupe look stunning but sadly their Corteo show is sub-par.
Genuine highlights included Shanay Holmes as Nancy in the Oliver! rival, The Comedy About Spies extract, the ballet and Yorkshire comedian Scott Bennett who tickled us with his thoughts on OAPs rioting over the winter fuel allowance. “I can’t imagine my dad throwing a petrol bomb. £1,69 a litre? It’s not happening.”
He imagined a pensioners’ protest as “What do we want? Can’t remember! When do we want it? Not during The Chase!.”
Glaswegian stand-up Larry Dean had decent accent-based material, while mimic Matt Forde gave us a so-so Starmer impression with no satirical bite. His Trump was better. But naturally the great ‘satirist’ had nothing on blundering or cackling Kamala who had actually been in power since 2021.
Forde described Starmer’s distinctive robotic voice as “blocked-nosed and lock-jawed”. Rayner, Reeves and Miliband have adenoidal speech impediments too; Cabinet meetings must sound like the waiting room at an Ear, Nose & Throat Clinic.
ITV’s narrow definition of variety – predominantly singers – excludes a whole range of performing talents. The sooner they lose their monopoly on the Royal, the better.
If TV bosses genuinely support variety why not create formats where promising pros can grow and be seen? When we had them in the 70s and 80s, millions watched. Perhaps the strangest historic variety bills can be found on Talking Pictures’ The Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club, with episodes mixing The Three Degrees with the Krankies, and Stephane Grappelli with Little & Large. Bernard Manning tells inoffensive jokes and sings in a packed working men’s club. You can almost smell the spilled ale and pipe smoke. It’s a nostalgic joy.
The cop a lot of flak, and rightly so, but Wolf Hall: The Mirror & The Light was riveting. Closer to the intricate plotting of House Of Cards than The Tudors, it ended with assisted death enthusiast Henry VIII disposing of the loyal but cunning Thomas Cromwell – the Francis Urquhart of the saga.
Mark Rylance’s Cromwell was at his razor-sharp best when cross-examined by hostile nobles. He ridiculed their trumped-up charges effortlessly and made them despise him even more. How dare this mere blacksmith’s son outsmart the nobility? The spittle-flecked Duke Of Norfolk wanted him hung, drawn and quartered.
Cromwell told them their laughable charges would fail if he were brought to trial and immediately deduced that there wouldn’t be one. The axe duly fell.
This was the at their best, spell-binding, superbly-cast and utterly engrossing with a Bafta-worthy performance by Rylance. Now tell me again why they waste our money on garbage like Smoggie Queens.
Holliday Grainger’s Robin infiltrated a life drawing class on BBC1’s Strike: The Ink Black Heart only to find her target posing starkers. She looked very demure in her Una Thurman wig. In fact, demure she saw, demure she seemed to like it.
Another blow for our gloomy, one-legged, war veteran private eye Cormoran Strike. He and Robin lack the spark to make their smouldering/tedious sexual tension ignite. Even after necking a gallon of Scotch. Maybe try life drawing work, mate. It seems to do the trick.
The plot, adapted from Robert Galbraith’s dullest book, is barely worth talking about. It’s set in the online world of trolls and chat-rooms. Edie, the co-creator of a cult cartoon turned online game, was stalked by the mysterious Anomie and murdered.
There are far-right nutters, of course – there always are in TV dramas, but in fairness the Beeb seem to employ most of the far-left ones. Un-woke Wally makes videos calling, not unreasonably, for the Royal Navy’s role in ending the slave trade to be recognised and is therefore ‘dodgy’. Ho hum.
Small joys of TV: winning Strictly…The Specials: Live at Coventry Cathedral (Sky Arts)…Mark Rylance…The Likely Lads’ 1974 Xmas special (BBC4).
Random irritations: Smoggie Queens…absurd colour-blind casting in period dramas…Gino & Fred: Emissions Impossible – transmissions unwatchable.