Nairn Book and Arts Festival, Community Centre, Nairn, 10 June 2008

Jeremy Hardy

FOR ME, Jeremy Hardy is one of the giants of radio comedy. His mordant humour, driven by a splenetic, passionate anger, and a ‘what the hell?’ attitude to offending his (largely middle class) audience, has illumined programmes from ‘The News Quiz’ to ‘Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation’. Judging by the anticipatory buzz of the capacity audience in the Nairn Community Centre, I was not alone in that view.

And the first half proved us all triumphantly right. This was stand up as it should be-sharp, shooting from the hip, insulting everyone by turns (and didn’t we love it!), and puncturing authority and the establishment with well-aimed venomous darts. Some lines were so funny that they came with their own aftershock, as the full implications sank in of what you’d just heard.

And although this was just one gig on a UK tour, Hardy had plenty of fresh and well-informed material specially designed to offend Scots in general and Nairnites in particular. Wonderful stuff.

But then came the interval.

I don’t know what happened in those twenty minutes, but for the second half, we might as well have been watching a different act. Unfocused, clumsy, rambling, repetitive, and worst of all, unfunny-this was nothing like good stand-up.

Towards the end Hardy was even reduced to repeating, word for word, a rant from last week’s News Quiz. Does he think we Scots don’t get the show, or did he just not care? And a series of gratuitous insults about the oh-too-easy target of the Findhorn community were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

By the time the evening dragged wearily to its close, Hardy had been on stage for over two hours, not counting the interval, and for the second hour I felt as if I’d been trapped by the pub bore.

This fine Nairn Festival has provided some interesting lessons. The two professional writers I saw-Brookmyre and Dalrymple-proved to be brilliant performers, superbly well-prepared and not losing their grip on the audience for an instant; and thereby heightened my already considerable admiration for them.

The two professional performers, on the other hand-Hamilton and Hardy-were under-prepared, sloppy, and ultimately self-indulgent, and so I was sorry to find that two of my comedy idols had feet of clay. And the other lesson is that no stand-up should be allowed to perform, for more than 70 minutes-and never, never take an interval.

© Robert Livingston, 2008

Links

• Nairn Book and Arts Festival