3, 2, 1 With Flange Krammer

A multimedia comedy night which this month served up film clips, musical extracts and homemade planes on sticks took its leap offering a stage to the less than conventional comics on the circuit, embracing the bizarre aggression and a satire of old school nostalgia pastiche in Chapsom Bear, along with the whimsy and hand-collaged mermaids of Phil Lucas.

In fact, the evening was overly packed at times – with the first half around an hour long hosted by skiing playboy character Flange Krammer with his own twist on 80s gameshow TV favourites with three ladies from the audience as contestants, a ten minute break, and then another hour consisting of three acts. In a warm distracted room, by the end everyone was exhausted.

Phil Lucas enchanted with his seafood upholstered mitten and tightly choreographed multimedia, with the tech counterposed nicely by his refusal to use a microphone. Mr Susie was in turns sweetly charming and freakily unnerving as an alien, mining a lovely vein of comedy in words we should have but don’t. And headline act Colin Hoult was as ever a delight, sparking off the audience in character as raconteur actress Anna Man.

The evening functions, on the whole, by lifting the whole audience to a state of near hysteria and tickling it there with new, leftfield and unexpected humour. This balancing act wasn’t always an exact science, and the all male line-up (not counting Colin Hoult’s Anna Man) with an inclination towards ironic throwback machismo did leave large parts of the evening feeling quite boysy, but the audience didn’t seem to mind. In a world searching for the novelty of the new and extraordinary, to have it sought out and served up every month for us is a lucky treasure.

The Old Market, 8 January 2014

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