Ross Noble is one of those genre-busting stand-ups who does not slot naturally into a Live at the Apollo-shaped box. His flights of fancy have been welcome on Have I Got News for You but he has always been a bit constrained by desk-based templates. With Freewheeling he may finally have found the format that suits his spontaneous, people-person style.
Freewheeling is a travel documentary with a difference (lest we forget, Noble did do a more conventional one biking around Australia for Five a few years ago which was not bad). Each week our leather-clad lad simply mounts his trusty Ducati and asks Twitter where he should go. In last night's first episode this took him from motorcyclist Mecca the Ace Cafe in north London to Weedon Bec, the most central spot in England – well, one of the the most central spots in England – and Swindon, along the way gatecrashing a marketing meeting and taking over the powerpoint presentation, much to the amusement and bemusement of a room a besuited salarymen.
The joy of the programme was clearly the random element. Early on Noble bought an ugly ceramic dog from an antique shop – I'm using the word antique in the loosest sense here – and this pooch became his surrogate Sancho Panza sidekick. At one point the surrealist Phileas Fogg decides to host a porcelain ornament beauty contest on a rainy afternoon and attracts about a dozen misfits. Would it have been funnier if 2000 people had turned up? Possibly, but the small motley crew Noble attracted certainly gave him plenty of comic potential.
I did wonder about the practicalities though. In theory Noble could go anywhere, but the budgetary implications of long-distance filming may possibly preclude some suggestions. And presumably if Twitter suggested that I turn up onstage at Eddie Izzard's rehearsals carrying a small hedge and accompanied by a camera crew I'd have more difficulties doing it than Noble, who shares a promoter with Izzard. I expect some escapades didn't work out and ended up in the digital dustbin too, so it was nicely subversive that when his GPS sent him to a care home by mistake we were led to believe he had been brusquely told to turn the cameras off, but then he showed footage to reveal how hospitable the manager was.
Other moments were both entertaining and baffling. How simple was it for him to stroll in and edit the Swindon Advertiser? (bloody comedians, coming over here and taking journalists' jobs…) and at the start in the Ace Cafe he gets told to sling his hook by Mike "The Streets" Skinner. Was that staged or genuine? Presumably Skinner signed a release form, so was it being played for laughs?
But these are minor quibbles. Noble is the kind of performer who needs room to breath much more than a needs a finely honed script. To be perfectly frank he could have wandered around his house for an hour and made me laugh, but the sight of him verbally sparring with a bible-bashing slightly manic street preacher in a shop doorway or hugging a fan whose flies were undone were the highlights of my evening. There is clearly plenty more mileage in Freewheeling.
Update: After this review appeared Ross Noble tweeted me himself to say that what you see is what happened. "You can see who said they didn't want to be on camera as their faces are pixilated. The whole thing is genuinely done on the fly." And as for editing the paper it really was as simple as it looked: "The boss tweeted me and said do you want to edit the paper I said yes." I also wondered what his trousers were made of: "The pants are Kevlar jeans I could get shot in the arse and I would survive in theory."
Freewheeling in on Dave on Tuesdays at 10pm and is also viewable on the Dave website. Ross Noble has just announced his new tour, Tangentleman, which runs from September 2014 to February 2015. Details here.
