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ssp at Edinburgh, Frank Skinner
- Pleasance Caberet Bar
- Edinburgh
- 23rd August
Nostalgia-fuelled naughtiness.
After a lucrative ten-year hiatus in TV, Skinner’s much anticipated return to stand up has made all the critics ‘top festival picks’ list.
The man is certainly a professional. In fact, I’m fairly certain that if Skinner were placed on any stage, utterly unprepared and devoid of material, he could quite feasibly entertain the socks of the audience for well over an hour (Gervais, on the other hand, might struggle...).
His timing is impeccable and his relentless heckler assassinations brilliant, but the inclusion of some dated material means that Skinner is far from the Perrier winner he once was. Not everyone will appreciate Skinners’ paedophilia gags, lengthy discussion of the most respectable age for a man to retire from masturbation and his graphic enactments of ‘granny porn’, but many will. Although the die-hard Skinner fans applauded his one-liners and observations of life as a post-50-year-old man relentlessly, I can’t help but feel that a large part of the audiences’ appreciation was fuelled by nostalgia.
Frank Skinner is no longer at the top of his game, he knows that. And I’m sure that treating his 50 year old self as if it were 100 (he now worries about ‘having a fall’) can’t be helping; but with a face as enduringly cheeky as his, Skinner really needn’t worry about occupying anything other than the naughty schoolboy persona that first shot him to fame.
Henrietta Clancy
