“I didn’t imagine the first time I’d be onstage at the Palladium would be this way,” an awestruck Jessie Ware told the full house on the first of two nights here. The Brit Award-nominated singer needed a moment to take in the success of the hit foodie podcast she records with her mother Lennie.
Table Manners is a phenomenon. It has attracted over 30 million downloads and guests as big as Sir Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton and Kylie Minogue, who are happy to chat about their eating habits to the gossipy hosts. For this live version the surprise guest was Julian Clary. Not quite as substantial a star, but excellent value when it came to pithy answers.
The Wares had a simple but effective chatty interview technique and were not remotely wrongfooted by the fact that Clary promptly revealed that he was not that into food as he toyed with their canapes. He and his husband do not cook anything special and he added they do not do takeaways either: “My mother said food deliveries are common.”
Dining tables were important places for the young Clary though. As a child it was where he used to tell stories to get a laugh, and he was still getting laughs at the onstage table, regaling everyone with the tale of his mother tipping a plate of meat over his father before revealing his fantasy last supper meal of “soft shell crab with an opium chaser”.
If Clary was an amusing amuse-bouche the main course after the interval felt more like a random selection of ingredients tossed into a pot. Firstly Jessie Ware answered audience questions which ranged from the possibly obscene (relating to pigs which she would not read out) to the breathlessly banal (“what did you eat today?”).
This was followed by a quiz in which four well-informed superfans competed to win Lennie’s chicken soup. Maybe you could call them souperfans. Except that the four contestants – a fifth lost their bottle on the way to the stage – turned out to be not so well-informed, resulting in a desperate anti-climax when none could scrape together enough answers to claim a victory without help from the audience.
But then audience involvement is part of the fun of podcast gigs. There is something uniquely bonding about these increasingly popular events. Fans are invested in a way music or comedy fans rarely are. The appreciative screams at the start of Table Manners were louder than anything I’ve ever heard at a stand-up gig. The performance was hardly high concept, but the live podcast gravy train will clearly run and run.
