Funny Festival Live review – BBC series puts standups back on stage

Victoria Wood, Harry Hill and Eddie Izzard are among the comics celebrated in the BBC’s new Festival of Funny. But standup strand Funny Festival Live platforms less heralded names – including those rookies to whom the closure of pubs and theatres has dealt a particularly severe blow. It began last night with a likable, lightweight gig from the Bedford Arms in Balham, hosted by Jason Manford in front of an actual, flesh-and-blood, non-digital audience.

How do they pull off this transgressive feat? The audience, two-dozen strong, are all members of the production team, Covid-secured to their sanitised fingertips. But their presence is still a treat, to armchair comedy fans like myself and comedians starved of in-the-room appreciation. It’s a tonic to see standups address Covid and our new normal, and not buffer and pixelate while doing so.

Manford sets the tone, with a host of gags about pandemic-era life – working as an Iceland delivery driver, performing comedy to an audience of cars, and marvelling at the government’s initially lax attitude to mask-wearing. That’s as politically pertinent as the show gets. First act Judi Love embarks on a joke about her auntie thinking “Covid is racist”, but doesn’t develop it, lingering instead on good-time gags about fancying strangers in face masks and getting drunk post-lockdown.

The evening’s most leftfield act is young Irishman Michael Stranney, with a set in the Spike Milligan tradition about his huge family and his dad’s job as a door-to-door door salesman. We also get the relative veteran Jayde Adams, driven by quarantine into fantasies about killing her partner – although the outre setups tend towards trad punchlines. “I’m not going to bury him under the patio, I’m going to make him lay it.”

The best line is Toussaint Douglass’s teasing little number about the child he’s planning with his white partner: “We all know who puts the cute into a mixed-race baby…” Douglass packs a lot into those few words: a handy skill to have if you’ve got only seven minutes to make a mark. The last year of these acts’ nascent careers may have been fraught – but their futures look brighter.