When most comics try out a new show, they book themselves a room above a pub. When Ricky Gervais tries out a new show, he books himself a mid-sized London theatre and sells it out in a matter of minutes.
But with tickets at a tenner, and all proceeds to the Macmillan Cancer Trust, he asks us to take this try-out for next year’s tour on its own terms. “There’ll be things that’ll be exclusive to you,” he says. “They’ll be the s*** bits.” Well, there are no s*** bits to worry about. A few ordinary bits, yes, and a tone that sometimes veers awkwardly between the self-parodically overstated and the apparently sincere. But even when consulting a running order on a lectern, or glancing longingly at the wings as his 45-minute set continues, Gervais remains an utterly engaging stage presence.
This, his third stand-up show, is called Fame, as befits a man who can start an anecdote with the line: “I got a property recently in Hampstead . . .” But this is a show that mostly takes his own elevated status as a starting point for digressions about whatever takes his fancy. And when he does touch on the issue of plastic public figures such as Abi Titmuss and Big Brother contestants, he’s at his clumsiest.
“I don’t want to be called a celebrity,” he says, “because I don’t want to be lumped in with these people.” But his digs at the culture of fame-for-fame’s-sake don’t add anything to a topic so familiar that Ben Elton’s already written two satirical novels about it.
Elsewhere, though, Gervais has an amazing knack for taking an unpromising idea and then making merry with it. Mostly this involves occupying a space somewhere between cheeky and reactionary, and seeing what fun can be had playing with the unsayable.
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So, while addressing his charitable works, he tells of how the writer and Comic Relief boss Richard Curtis keeps asking him to go to disease-ridden Africa: “And I say no, it sounds f***ing awful!” An artful pause. “He actually asked me to be in Love, Actually, and I said . . . tell me about that Africa thing again.”
He goes on to mock — or should that be mock mock? — a teenage cancer sufferer and an African farmer with ME, winning our sympathy by mocking himself most of all. Indeed, this work-in-progress show is at its best when Gervais acknowledges our expectations of him, even if it’s to deny them. A stocky rather than plump man, he talks about being labelled fat by the press — “because they need an adjective”. But he then gleans the biggest laugh by reading out the headline used to described him when photographed out running wearing his MP3 player — “iPodge”.
And when he drops a routine about rape, deciding that he would rather do “that dance”, he sustains the show with just the slightest hints of thedance routine from The Office.
There are moments when that outspokenness verges on boorishness. Gervais’s outsized comic persona is engaging rather than enraging when he’s undercutting himself as well as others (which is why his pretend bullying of sidekick Karl Pilkington can be so irksome on his podcasts). But while the material here isn’t always top-whack, the delivery almost always is.
Come next year’s tour, this should be another delight.