Sandi Toksvig: The National Trevor Show

Sandi Toksvig: The National Trevor Show

Toksvig has to be the most delightful, most charming and sharpest of wits on the entertainment scene. This show is an evening of pure delight that leaves you wanting, no feeling like she is your best friend, your favourite auntie… even your mum. The format is almost a lecture, but in its all embracing and engaging style it feels more like an intimate chat and the chat is about the nature of fame and how we seem to be losing the ability to openly engage with each other. Of course that could be rather presectiptive but in her deft hands and engaging her brilliant with and almost encyclopaedic knowledge she makes it side splittingly funny, funny but also moving. She engages with the audience, finding people that she can label national treasures (or should I say Trevors), she quizzes us with crazy facts and she takes questions from the audience.

So what make this different from a conventional stand up routine? Well that’s an easy answer after watching and listening for two hours, Toksvig’s act is no act at all, it’s a heart-felt display of her real beliefs, larded of course with chuckles and side splitting laughs, but at the end of the evening it carries a genuine message and that is to engage with each other, embrace humanity and live a better life.

My only regeret is that when given the opportunity to ask a question I failed to ask mine. “Dear Sandi, please come home with me and make me laugh and smile all night and all day”.

Brighton Dome
3 February

★★★★★

Andrew Kay