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Robin Ince
- Hay Festival
- Hay-On-Wye
- 02nd June 2007
An alternative book reading from Ince and co
After eight days of intelligentsia gleefully feeding a salivating audience snippets from their latest prose (priced £25 from a book shop, handily, in the tent next door… and I’ll be doing a signing rah, rah etc…) Robin Ince and his band of merry individuals swing into town to read the rich snippets from the poorly written.
Ince must be a second hand bookshop owner’s dream customer. He’s the kind of bibliophile that thinks nothing of bulk buying a set of twelve anthologies entitled simply Stories for Men. His act consists of reading from such thought defying delights and this forms the basis of his comedy routine.
Interspersing Ince’s readings come a troupe of comedians all deemed worthy of inclusion in the Book Club, only two of which have any impact in tonight’s show. Martin White’s accordion playing holds a level of interest but is also a lesson that while an accordion version of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights will make you laugh for the first thirty seconds it’s impossible to sustain that laughter for the full five minutes. Jo Neary is, as expected, charming. She keeps her two concept pieces short, leaving you wanting more. However, Natalie Haynes' five minutes were, frankly, forgettable, and Peter Buckley Hill’s marathon musical session, including haiku’s of every song off Sergeant Pepper, was agonising.
Ince has clearly stumbled across a concept that works, and works very, very well in some cases. The law defying graphs in the book How to Attract Sexy Women (which ‘proves’ females become sexy by the age of two) was a particular high/low point. You often find yourself thinking: "This man is making a comic career simply from reading bad books out loud." More often this thought is replaced by: "I wish I’d thought of that."
Henry Widdicombe
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