It can’t be easy to become the nation’s favourite comedian. Harder still to remain so. Consider the achievement, then, of Peter Kay, who got there, broke every popularity record going, then gave public life a decade-long swerve – before returning, after years of only intermittent visibility, to find himself more popular than ever. As I write, the 02 Arena’s website has crashed under the weight of thousands of fans jostling to book for the Bolton man’s new tour, announced last week and his first since 2010. That last standup tour is still ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest-selling of all time. Who would bet against its 2022 follow-up raising the bar even higher?
So what’s behind this colossal love-in – and will these gigs justify the hype? For most of his fans they probably will, because no one does relatable observational comedy better than Kay. His genius, strategic or otherwise, has been to appeal across the tribal divides of British comedy – or to short-circuit those divides by good nature and good jokes alone. Early success with Channel 4’s That Peter Kay Thing (a mockumentary before the genre became ubiquitous) and its spin-off Phoenix Nights (featuring Kay as wheelchair-using club impresario Brian Potter) bought him cachet with the alternative comedy crowd.
His live work, meanwhile, placed him firmly at the end of the pier, with its neverending supply of jokes about childhood, family life and humdrum everyday routine. Brand names from the 70s featured prominently. So too northernisms, in the work of a man whose ear for the bathetic-poetic flotsam of provincial life drew comparisons to Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett.
Like Billy Connolly – his closest rival as Britain’s best loved comic – Kay had a real blue-collar professional life before comedy, working as a packer in a toilet-roll factory, at a cash-and-carry and in a bingo hall. Like Connolly, he drew on those worlds to make comedy with that elusive “common touch”: his (and Connolly’s) funniest lines are often things other people have said. Kay’s gesture with ticket prices for his new tour, which start from an affordable £35, will bolster his man-of-the-people reputation – although the words “start from” are doing some heavy lifting there.
Back in the day, Kay’s break came with a victory in the prestige talent contest for budding standups, So You Think You’re Funny?, in 1997, then with a shortlisting for the Edinburgh comedy award (then the Perrier) the following year. The Irishman Tommy Tiernan won, but one judge went on record as saying Kay needed the prize less, as he was clearly a superstar in the making.
In the intervening years, comedy – in Edinburgh at least – became more heart-on-sleeve, with recent fringe graduates majoring in personal intimacy as well as big laughs. But that’s not Kay’s style, and we can expect these upcoming shows to give us little into the 49-year-old’s long recent absence from the stage, his tour cancellation in 2017 and a delay in the release of his Car Share sitcom.
My bet is that none of this will be addressed. For all his professional cuddliness, all those jokes about buying his mum a bungalow, Kay is a canny operator whose hail-fellow-well-met demeanour belies an intensely private man, cheerfully out of sync with the self-disclosing mode of modern standup.
The casual comedy-goer doesn’t care, of course. We go to standup gigs for a laugh, not soul-baring. But at least to this viewer, there has sometimes been a novelty deficit in Kay’s live work, his jokes about “childhood memories, family failings, and the daft things folk say” (in one critic’s words) coming across as accomplished and generic in equal measure. It can look a bit calculating, how tightly he cleaves to the parochial world of Hobnobs, Munch Bunch yoghurts and elderly relatives getting their words in a tangle. Although, to be fair, it’s hard to project homeliness when you’re performing in front of a humungous playback image of your own face and to crowds of 20,000.
He pulls it off because he’s a terrifically skilled comic technician. You could say of Kay that he’s got “funny bones”, or you could break it down into all those act-outs that make his physicality the joke, the dismayed facial expressivity, the instinct for when to play to expectation (“Jokes you can join in on”, as he describes his material) and when to subvert it. All of this is on expert display on stage, but for my money its best platform is the TV screen. None of Kay’s live work so far has held a candle to Car Share, with its big soppy heart, its eye for the minutiae of human interactions, and the dotty details (Kay and Sian Gibson’s side-eyes and sheepishness, that car radio burbling surreally in the background).
Maybe he’s spent a dozen years cooking up a standup set that can feel as fresh, nuanced and creatively ambitious as Car Share. Or maybe he’ll be back with more garlic bread, Rich Tea biscuits and grannies that confuse DVDs with “VD” – which would be fine, too. Either way, and overloaded ticket websites permitting, it looks like hundreds of thousands of us will turn out to laugh along.
