Review: Stephen Merchant [Hello Ladies] – Newcastle City Hall

Stephen Merchant: Hello Ladies

Halfway through Stephen Merchant’s set at Newcastle’s City Hall I made a quick note of the topics he’d covered so far: chatting up girls in a bar, text speak, masturbation, pornography, airline security, annoying children, Catholicism, then, of course, paedophilia. Walk into any comedy club around the UK and you’ll hear a similar school of thought – so why should you pay £28 upwards to listen to Merchant’s shtick?

Well, because he’s actually a very good stand-up – and with a series of one man sketches and some excellent writing Merchant brings his script to life.

Dancing his way onto the stage with the confidence of his counterpart Ricky Gervais, Merchant assures this near sell-out crowd that he may be a bit of a loser but he knows what he’s doing. And he’s enjoying this tour all the more now he doesn’t have to share the profits with ‘you know who.’

It’s undoubtedly his easiest laugh of the night, as he plays on Gervais’ ‘love to hate’ status; but it’s the first of God knows how many applause breaks in this slick 70 minute set. It’s clear Merchant is enjoying being the centre of attention for a change.

Self-deprecation is at the heart of most routines here, like his opening gambit about being too tall or a sublime routine on the mundane family at a wedding that provides visual gags aplenty and a ‘rewarding’ payoff. Effective call-backs arrive in the same material, too, as Merchant revisits an earlier routine on venn diagrams. Generally he employs advanced comedy techniques to good effect. The line about late night phone calls, for example, is a superb pull back and reveal and got the laughs it deserved.

Merchant doesn’t always offer a unique angle, though. A sketch about ‘text speak’ – which is as mundane as it sounds – follows from a routine on splitting the restaurant bill on a first date. Then he delves into the ‘all priests are paedophiles’ myth with questionable comic upshot.

But these are minor irks, I suppose. Even if certain sections of his set failed to grab me, the audience stuck with him throughout; his reward for an otherwise solid set.

Simply put, Hello Ladies is one of the most entertaining shows you’ll see this year.