“Why can’t I just be normal?” laments the comic and voice of Love Island, Iain Stirling. To which watching fans can only reply: “But you are. You’re as normal as can be.” Stirling’s show, Failing Upwards, recorded at Alexandra Palace and released on Amazon Prime Video, finds the Scotsman adopting the most normal of thirtysomething standup poses – that of the hapless manchild ill-fitted to adulthood, here redeemed by the love of a responsible and beautiful wife. Abnormal it is not, but the abjection and idiocy of Stirling’s self-portraits, energetically animated, often raise a smile.
Failing Upwards is strenuously of-its-moment in its depiction of feckless, emotionally underdeveloped men and competent, caring women, even if there’s a thread of humblebrag in Stirling’s repeated claim that, in his marriage to TV presenter Laura Whitmore, he’s “punching above his weight”. A sign of the times too, perhaps, is the extent of Stirling’s neurosis about his supposed chubbiness, which – after one more routine about his tubby belly eating the waistband of his boxer shorts – feels laid on a bit thick.
