Phil Ellis has been watching Netflix specials, and has noticed that all the alpha standups now have a hype-man to big them up pre-show. Here, then, is his own version, a shuffling fellow northerner (comic Tom Short) deadpanning a list of Ellis’s non-achievements in a threadbare American accent, punctuated by gunshot SFX and an airhorn. The modest success of a Taskmaster stint has not gone to Ellis’s head: with his new show, he continues to revel in the failures and banalities of his midlife, a 44-year-old man recently moved home with his parents – single, balding, skint.
In Bath Mat, he turns all that into a raucous laughalong, inviting us to pitch abuse at him, straw-polling his observations with the audience, and laughing himself, throughout, to think he gets away with doing this for a living. Over two hours, I found the set more attenuated than the concentrated hits of Ellis I’ve enjoyed on the fringe. It’s a structureless compendium of barely related routines, with more emphasis on so-so standup than the tomfoolish antics that often characterise his work. With sections such as the chat he has with his crowd about roadkill, or another about luxury treatment for pets, we’re in the territory less of precision-focused comedy and more all-in-it-together bants.
