There are few more familiar standup comedy attitudes than: I feel like I’m getting old. It’s the one Jessica Fostekew leads with in Mettle, in which she addresses turning 40 and the approaching-geriatric behaviours that milestone has triggered. It’s a topic she sets about with the same gusto she brought to weightlifting (in 2019’s Hench), and to her midlife embrace of a broader sexuality (Wench, three years later). More gusto, indeed – perhaps because, lacking the thematic consistency of those earlier sets, Mettle needs a bit more elbow grease to make it fly.
The show isn’t really about “accelerated ageing”, in Fostekew’s phrase – even if the idea is returned to here and there to make Mettle cohere. Really, this is a looser offering, that revisits the territory of Hench, includes a hair-raising tale from our host’s TV career, and takes a late-stage turn towards eco-anxiety. The default mode is volcanic pretend-rage, always offset by Fostekew’s amusement at her own preposterousness. A great shrieking voice and eyebrows raised at every conceivable angle are duly deployed in the show’s uproarious howl of annoyance at litterers, Ulez refuseniks and a death-defying experience on a telly show about dangerous roads.
