A recent star of Saturday Night Live UK, Paddy Young is enjoying a moment of life-changing fulfilment and success. But “I’ve brought the worst plus-one to the party,” he says – by which he means himself. If ever the truism that money can’t buy you happiness needed demonstration, look no further than Young’s new show, Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? It finds the 35-year-old lamenting (as ever) the circularity of his domestic life, a luckless perma-bachelor doomed for ever to watch on as his housemates graduate to more grown-up, loved-up lives elsewhere.
Young has cultivated the perfect persona to sell this sorry tale: a plangent northerner, half-turned away from the audience and side-eyeing us coyly with this or that tale of hapless manboyishness. Is it an act? Well, no, it’s an exaggeration, and part of the fun is to work out how sincere sad-sack Paddy really is, halfway through his three score years and 10, stuck in a house share with “three PS2s and not a lamp in sight”. He’s bothered not that his flatmate is having sex too noisily, but that it’s not audible enough (“Let me in!”). Ghosted by a recent date, he has resorted to stalking his first teenage kiss on Facebook, then all the way to Copenhagen, fantasising about inserting himself into her wholesome family life.
