Junior Simpson
07 September 2003
First up tonight is Rohan Agalwatta (crazy name, crazy guy) who not only has great comedy hair – a kind of thinning crested grebe – but does some great bad hair jokes (‘Try 362 days of bad hair days!’), he looks like a younger, more twisted Jeff Goldbloom and describes how he puts down ‘last of the Mohicans,’ on census forms (‘you then don’t have to tell them who your next of kin is,’) and yet with some great one liner whimsy he appears slightly bemused as if he isn’t quite sure he should be here. His pacing was a little bit slow, the delivery a little bit unsure and he didn’t build on his jokes which was a shame given that the crowd were obviously up for it and his material had such promise.
I’m standing behind Simpson as he does stretches to limber up before going on stage. I can almost feel the tension as he pounds onto the stage and as he does his Ragamuffin piss-take you get a real sense of the energy and power of his performance. Simpson grabs the audience’s attention from the off and drags it to the places (‘Atkin’s dieters have no friends after four weeks as their breath smells like a Labradors arsehole.’) that he wants them to go. There is a kind of glee in his show and a confidence in his abilities that is beguiling. His sex tips skit – ‘ring the bell, work the hallway!’ has the audience in stitches.
Simpson doesn’t shy away from the subject of blackness, he delights in telling us of the welcome prepared for him by his white girlfriends white-cloaked relatives in the small Lincolnshire village who welcomed him with ‘a large burning cross,’ but equally he isn’t a one-trick pony and his impressions of Sean Connery doing Sean Connery are impressive.
An excellent start to what looks like being a real treat of a comedy season.
Lee Coombes