Last Thursday we drove to the Shoreham Ropetackle Arts Centre to see Robin Ince. I'd booked the tickets back in January, so this had been a long time coming. The Ropetackle is a lovely venue, it's staffed by volunteers and has a licensed bar with some lovely beers. The crowd seemed a bit older than I expected, but then the penny dropped that they might have been there because of his involvement in The Infinite Monkey Cage, the BBC show with Brian Cox.
I was there because of his podcast work with Michael Legge on Vitriola, and with Josie Long on the Book Shambles. Those shows are unscripted, unlike the Infinite Monkey Cage, and so I had a good idea of what to expect from one of Robin's shows, despite not having seen him live before.
In the podcasts I've listened to he is full of ideas and stories, to the extent that those stories and ideas compete with each other and cut across each other. He can be a bit frantic, but he is like a kid in a candy store, delighted by new information and endlessly curious. As he said to us, he doesn't talk to anyone all day, and then he has us, his paying audience, captive for two hours, and he downloads or broadcasts all his thoughts for the day to us in that time.
The show was brilliant, it was two hours (with a twenty-minute interval), and it did seem a little haphazard. It was mostly funny; he leapt from subject to subject, seemingly without any direction or plan, the words and thoughts flooding out of his brain, and it was always interesting. After the interval he did have to rush through his piece on art appreciation, but then at the end he had a number of callbacks to things he'd mentioned, so maybe it wasn’t as unplanned as it seemed.
Robin hasn't been doing stand-up for a couple of years and I'm glad I got to see him. With all the other things he's doing (the BBC show, the two podcasts) he might not be doing as much stand-up as before. The show was just what I was expecting though, and I would recommend going to see him.
I'm planning on seeing a couple of comedians during the Brighton Festival and if I do, I'll try to mention them here.
TTFN.
