Funnyman Chris Addison on horsemeat, Home Secretary Theresa May and how the M5 keeps Gloucester out
Knowing Chris Addison best as hapless political aide Ollie Reeder in political satire The Thick Of It, I wasn't sure what to expect from his stand-up tour.
I'm used to seeing him standing awkwardly in a suit, the victim of Malcolm Tucker's foul-mouthed insults. But in stand-up mode, Addison was just as funny.
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Chris Addison
His set was two hours of boundless energy, flailing limbs and lots of laughs.
He had Cheltenham pegged from the start, saying he was genuinely pleased to be in "the period drama town built by women purely to trap Colin Firth".
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The caricature of Cheltenham continued throughout - the horsemeat scandal doesn't affect us ("Findus? We're fine. Ocado on Tuesday, as usual") and we were never touched by the riots ("Cheltenham looters would be running around with tins of Farrow and Ball paint - I've got the duck egg blue for the billiard room!").
In a routine about motorway driving, the M5 was the "wall" created to keep Gloucester at arm's length.
When Addison asked the audience to contribute their own anecdotes of lies they'd been told us children, one surly member piped up with a deliberately barbed: "I was told northerners were funny".
But Addison batted it off in hilarious fashion, proving in just a few sentences that he was, as he said, "funnier and cleverer than you".
Addison is clearly a smart chap, and he proved time and again how well he knows his politics and history.
No part of the establishment escaped the mockery - the government, the opposition, the royal family, organised religion and the media were all targets.
His impression of Theresa May shrieking about how difficult it is to be Home Secretary almost had me in tears.
The short interval in the show seemed to throw the momentum off a little and the second half was disjointed in parts, but this surprisingly animated comedian always got things back on track.
And the huge range of people in the audience - from teenagers right through to grandparents - just shows how popular Addison is becoming.
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