Dr Phil Hammond is a hilarious and wildly successful comedian whose career is built on the ruins of the NHS. His act has spawned a host of imitators on the stand up-circuit and they share Dr Phil’s confused adoration for the NHS. All of them love the idea of universal healthcare but they dislike the messy practical details. And they’re convinced that extra cash will save the system. The evidence suggests otherwise; handing more money to the NHS is like giving a gambling addict the keys to a bullion van.
The gallows humour is delightful if you’re not stuck in an NHS queue
Dr Phil claims that he would gladly pay higher taxes because the NHS has to scrape by on ‘third-world funding’. This is part of the difficulty. Even a well-informed source like Dr Phil pretends that spending billions a month and employing 1.5 million staff makes Britain a ‘third-world’ country. He’s joined on stage by an unthreatening sidekick, Dame Clare Gerada, who prefers prejudice to comedy. She complains that Brexit led to staff shortages and to problems with the supply of vital medicines. Ultimately, she claims, leaving the EU killed more people than Covid.
Dr Phil and Dame Clare have an evident distaste for the wealthy (a group from which they exclude themselves, of course) and they question the wisdom of allowing rich people to use the NHS at all. Dr Phil suggests that anyone who pays taxes in the Cayman Islands should have the right to call an ambulance – provided it comes from the Cayman Islands. Dame Clare adds that it would probably arrive more quickly than an NHS ambulance. Their gallows humour is delightful if you’re not a patient stuck in an NHS queue.
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Melanie McDonagh
Diane Abbott’s masterful Assisted Dying speech will come back to haunt us
Nerine Skinner’s The Exorcism of Liz Truss contains an internal drama about the perils of success. In the summer of 2022, as Truss’s star rose, Skinner began to make tons of money impersonating her. But now Skinner wants to escape the shadow of her subject. Why? As Truss fades into history, the demand for Skinner’s services will dwindle too. Her impersonation is good but very limited. She does the off-kilter smile and the jerky delivery, and she captures the essence of Truss’s blinkered and hectoring persona. She comes across as a bumptious, irritating ten-year-old who believes that her main vice, her steam-roller self-confidence, is a virtue.
Truss had a well-publicised fling with the MP Mark Field, which caused Field’s marriage to collapse while Truss kept her relationship intact. On stage, Truss relates these events with a victorious smirk and a thumbs-up as if there was no emotional cost. Skinner evidently finds Truss a very cold fish indeed, but that’s not a good starting point for an impersonation. Having exhausted her main subject, Skinner turns to Nadine Dorries, whom she portrays as a perfumed matriarch obsessed with Boris Johnson. This is amusing, harmless, and enjoyable.
Skinner tries Ed Davey but she can’t do him. So she invents an Australian gym mistress who helps Davey to keep in shape. It’s feeble satire. And the gym mistress ends up teaching the audience to perform aerobics. What happened to Davey? Skinner simply gave up on the impersonation. She makes a half-hearted attempt to ridicule Angela Rayner’s piercing voice and lisping diction but she seems fearful of damaging her target. Skinner orders us to feel sympathy for Rayner because she had a baby while still at school, as if the pregnancy were a misfortune imposed on Rayner by the crowd at Edinburgh. The show ends with an affectionate take-off of Margaret Thatcher as a flirty vampire. Skinner is too nice to be a satirist.
After Endgame is a confessional monologue by Kevin James Doyle, a New York chess grandmaster who gives private lessons to children. To interest the kids, he uses fairy tales and folk myths – but his secret weapon is incompetence: ‘I let the children win.’ This ploy guarantees his popularity as a tutor. Kevin is contacted by a billionaire from Singapore who praises his ability to teach complex abstract systems through the medium of folk stories. Together they set out to formalise Kevin’s methods and to turn them into a lucrative business. Kevin seems set to make a fortune but his journey to Singapore immerses him in a genuine game of survival involving strategy, cunning and false moves – just like chess. And he doesn’t realise what’s going on until it’s too late. This is a riveting and hilarious hour of storytelling about self-deception and the art of gamesmanship. Not just a chess lesson. A life lesson.
Finlay Christie is a posh white comedian in the mould of Jack Whitehall. He’s witty, self-deprecating and charismatic, and he likes to play both sides at once. Sometimes he poses as the child of privilege: ‘I love Edinburgh. It’s like a seventh home to me.’ And sometimes he presents himself as a skint young adult who resents the complaints of mouldy old pensioners. ‘I can’t afford to heat my house,’ they grumble. To Christie, that sounds like a boast. ‘You’ve got a house?!’
This is a riveting and hilarious hour of storytelling. Not just a chess lesson. A life lesson
He avoids politics, climate change and trans rights and he focuses instead on his struggle to pass himself off as a regular dude. The show’s hook is a rap song that he wrote with his ‘crew’ when he was 16. Being rap, the subject is how to make tons of money very fast but because he and his crew were at public school they simply telephoned their parents and asked for the cash. This sounds like a rather slim motif, but it delivers heaps of comedy because young white men feel very inauthentic these days and they suffer from a permanent crisis of identity. He taps into those anxieties beautifully.
Great things will come his way soon. TV exposure, no doubt. He’ll probably attract the envy of his rivals on the circuit as well. But that’s hardly worth fretting about. You’re not truly popular until you’re hated.
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