‘Why weren’t you like this through there?!” We’re in the foyer of the Stand Comedy Club in Glasgow, to which the denouement of Nick Helm’s touring show has been unavoidably displaced. After a long break and an auditorium emptied for a medical emergency, the comic is performing to the handful of punters prepared to wait until well after 11 o’clock for the show’s closing moments. Helm perches on the bar. His diehards semi-circle around him. No other crowd on his tour will get this intimate an experience – and the laughs (more so than they were in the main theatre) are accordingly uproarious.
No doubt Helm would prefer his show to have proceeded without an ambulance call for a sick audience member. But it allows him to build a rapport, and deliver a memorable experience, that otherwise hadn’t looked likely. The show’s first three-quarters find the 45-year-old grumping at his audience as usual, recalling being bullied in childhood and touching on the struggles with depression he has chronicled in earlier shows. He relates too his search for a house and his career drift since his sitcom Uncle ended in 2017.
This stuff is conspicuously meandering, unedited and not packed with laughs, with compensation coming in the form of Helm’s emotional honesty and sense of his own ridiculousness – or squalor, as per one routine about his relationship with his “fleshlight”. It’s also elevated by intermittent rock songs by the gravel-voiced metalhead, from opening singalong Dump the Motherfucker to a closer that takes devil-worshipping to a lewd new level.
At its best, the show has the captivating idiosyncrasy that comes when an act does their own thing and no one else’s – see Helm roaring his Nosferatu song (about being sucked dry by a vampire – or is it a sex toy?) while bedecked in a pair of fairy-lit butterfly wings. Then come those unforeseen closing stages, a storytelling session for two dozen stragglers out in the foyer, when – off stage, unbowed, just for us – he’s even more enjoyable still.
