Having expected Simon Amstell to be the closing act on Saturday it felt like a bonus that Mark Watson ended proceedings in the Comedy Tent. Watson is a bit of a comedy legend, what with his erudite books – he has a new one out now, Hotel Alpha – and his epic marathon Edinburgh shows, but I hadn’t seen him for a while so I was looking forward to his set and it didn’t disappoint.
Watson kicked off with a tactic he has used before, of emerging from the back of the venue rather than the wings of the stage. It fits in perfectly with his polite, passive aggressive personality. Nothing flashy, but at the same time doing something special and eye-catching. Which after a long day of stand-ups rooted to the same spot immediately gave the set a unique atmosphere.
And – I presume this was spontaneous – Watson decided that he liked being in the middle of the floor surrounded by discarded pizza boxes and plastic glasses so much he would do the whole gig there, turning it into an ad hoc in-the-round gig. It gave him plenty of opportunity to chat to people Jesus-like at his feet and also plenty of opportunity to have a moan about the intrusive music. The loud guitars of First Aid Kit wafting over from the music stage became something of a running gag.
Watson’s material was presumably a preview of his forthcoming Edinburgh show, Flaws, so I won’t go into too much depth to avoid spoilers. But as well as the inevitable gags about his tortuous journey to the Suffolk venue he laid bare a darker side to the nerdy, eager-to-please, puppyish persona than I’d previously seen. I guess this is his mid-life crisis show. He revealed that he had been drinking more than was healthy in recent years, though somehow it is hard to imagine this bespectacled, smiley storyteller knocking back bottles of Jack Daniels for breakfast. Maybe it was an extra glass of Chardonnay at dinner.
His decision to work from offstage gave a looser feel to his set than one might have expected, but in the context of laid-back Latitude this was a Good Thing. In one hilarious moment he chased a mum leaving the venue to try to get her to stay for more rather than track down her errant children. And as the throng outside was watching it on a screen anyway it hardly mattered where he was to them. He finished by finally going onstage, thinking that he would have to clamber up, but then someone opened up a gate in the barrier for him. Which kind of summed up both Watson and Latitude’s gentle appeal. Comedy as the new rock and roll? This was more comedy as garden fete.
