‘Twenty one years of hard graft on the comedy scene, to now be best known for dancing.” The ironies of his newfound celebrity are not lost on Chris McCausland, not only the winner of last year’s Strictly Come Dancing but a contestant so well-loved, his success so cheering, he’s been credited with redeeming the entire franchise. Now he’s back to the thing he’s been longing to do, he says, after four exhausting months of cha cha, quickstep and American smooth: sitting on a stool for a while, telling jokes.
He’s good at it: those 21 years weren’t wasted. ‘Yonks!’, by his own admission, is about nothing in particular. It plants a flag in familiar standup territory and – hey, the guy’s tired – seldom roams far beyond. There’s a lot of “back in the day”, as McCausland reminisces about his delinquent childhood and life before smart technology. There’s the odd name-dropping yarn from his life as a TV star, but they’re outnumbered by tales insisting upon his Everybloke credentials – like the resolutely anti-PC joke set in his local pub, or the closing anecdote about a recent rectal examination.
