The Musical Comedy Awards Final always feels slightly different to most other comedy awards finals and last night was no exception. There were only five finalists, they had longer than the usual 7 - 10 minutes to prove themselves and all the acts performed in the first half, with other acts entertaining the crowd after the break. There was another unexpected difference last night too. No women were in the final. Obviously the judges in the heats simply picked the best acts, but it was a shock that no women made it through to the last quintet.
After comperes Horse and Louis warmed the audience up with a mix of cheeky gags and party games – I have to admit I’m getting a bit old for musical statues, ie I’m over five – the first act, Cribb and Morgan, kept the energy level up with three smart songs and a few surprises. Although they were essentially a double act, a trumpeter had a wonderfully comic cameo and by the end of their set they had turned into a full-blown four-piece band.
Their material, if tending towards the lyrically list-y, was a very impressive mix of the obvious and the ingenious, all delivered with a bit of self-deprecation and a lot of gusto, while a large screen power-point presentation added extra laughs. Their first song pondered on what had happened to the women in Lou Bega’s 15 year old hit Mambo No 5. A weird song to pick, but it worked well.
Their second number concerned avoiding spoilers about their favourite TV show. I suspect I wasn’t the only one to guess what was coming. Likewise when they started talking about online dating I knew a Tinder gag was heading our way. So many comedians are doing Tinder gags at the moment hopefully the acts won’t need to explain what Tinder is soon. The competition, by the way, is sponsored by WeGotTickets. Maybe next year it will be the Tinder Musical Comedy Awards.
After the high velocity opener the second act, David Elms, had such an intimate low-key style it looked as if he was about to suck the energy out of the room as he shuffled on with his guitar. But Elms is a confident, assured performer with a nicely twisted, unpredictable sense of humour and he handled the cool welcome brilliantly, soon getting everyone onside.
His inventive, whimsical songs were consistently subtle and smart. The stand-out was a love song based on the phonetic alphabet from Alpha to Zulu. You could argue that once you come up with the idea the song is easy to write, but Elms brought plenty of originality to it, taking the narrative in playful directions nobody could have predicted. He also did ad libbed callbacks about the previous act, which is a device Milton Jones uses very well. Last time I saw Elms he was playing to four people in a shed at Latitude. I suspect he will be playing to much bigger audiences in the future.
While there were no duds, Bob & Jim didn’t really set the room alight. I realise that their intention was to send up old music hall variety, but their gags and ukelele-backed style felt just plain old rather than ironically old. They evoked Stanley Unwin with their nonsense wordplay and, talking of duds, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their patter. The only relatively modern riff involved a Beyonce impression which went down very well.
Penultimate act Laurence Owen was more of a breath of dank air after that. Owen looks like a cross between a young Elvis Costello and Michael Gove and sings horrible songs about perverted Halloween costumes and enormous vaginas. Horrible yes, but also very funny. Their was something of the early Andrew Lawrence about his fondness for dredging up the sickest of images but it worked very well, the lyrics contrastingly excellently with his conservative, smart-jacketed appearance.
Final act, spoof boy band Rogue 5, have already popped up in another talent final and I expect they will keep cropping up, but not winning. They are the perfect embodiment of an act that audiences will love but judges will hate. Their unsubtle banter with the crowd, chatting up the women and mocking the men, got laughs and even cheers, but was hardly groundbreaking. Lead singer “Romeo” is a kind of boy band David Brent, constantly putting his foot in it, describing the token black singer in the trio as “100% pure mixed race”.
Their songs are smutty but disturbingly catchy. How Will I Know? is about chatting up a woman but not being sure if she is old enough to avoid a Savile scenario, while Triple FA is about finding someone attractive until you see them close-up. They are clearly not as stupid as the idiots they portray. A verse about men as well as women being ugly helps them avoid accusations of misogyny. Their closing number involved dragging an audience member onstage and mildly groping them for maximum embarrassment. Another crowdpleasing move but it’s got to be done smarter – look at Adam Riches or Nick Helm – to bag awards.
The judges – yours truly, Chortle’s Steve Bennett, The Guardian’s James Kettle, The Times’ Alex Hardy, Latitude programmer Tania Harrison, Comedy Blogedy’s Sara Shulman and Funny Women’s Lynne Parker – had a very brief meeting before declaring David Elms the winner. Cribb and Morgan were deserving runners up and Laurence Owen came in third. I felt that Owen had to get some kind of nod so that he wouldn’t write a scary song about us.
