Review: Geoff Norcott at Cambridge Junction
Known as one of the few right-leaning comedians – and the only one that I can think of to have appeared on the BBC – Geoff Norcott brought his Basic Bloke tour to Cambridge, to a sold-out Junction, on Friday, October 27.
Support act Jacob Hawley succeeded in getting the audience warmed up, his jokes and observations – particularly about living in Islington, coming from Stevenage, and his friends’ views on the trans issue – leaving much of the crowd in stitches.
Geoff then came out to an enthusiastic welcome, closing the first half of the show with comments on the state of UK politics, asking which kind of voter is Rishi Sunak trying to appeal to (“In my experience transphobic people love smoking”), and giving his take on the Philip Schofield, Huw Edwards and Russell Brand controversies.
The second half was the main event, Basic Bloke, which Geoff noted he performed at the Edinburgh Fringe – after which a woman told him that she enjoyed the show but found it “a bit too blokey”(!). Basic Bloke is the comedian and writer’s sixth UK tour.
Geoff spoke about, among many other things, what it’s like being a man in today’s world, the inaccuracy of television adverts, the downside of taking relatives with you on your stag do, some of the pitfalls of middle age, and his favourite motorway service station.
Although a lot of the show was funny, I felt the St Neots-based comic was holding back at times and could have taken certain topics to more extreme and even more amusing conclusions.
“Thanks to a very un Cambridge crowd tonight in Cambridge” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, suggesting that the audience from this famously left-leaning city were more open to his more ‘hard-hitting’ jokes than he might have expected (he did wonder out loud, maybe half-jokingly, whether that was because there were more people there from outside the city).
Although the majority of the audience did seem to respond very well to his humour, I could hear some murmurings of disapproval and the odd expression of shock and intake of breath at some of the more ‘risqué’ material – and at what were essentially statements of truth.
But all in all, Geoff’s set was extremely well-received – as was Jacob Hawley’s – and the comments left on X confirm that a good time was had by many.
[Read more: Geoff Norcott: ‘My biggest fear in comedy is cliché’, Comedian Leo Kearse: ‘You’ll see more exciting stuff in the clubs than you will on the BBC’]
For more on Geoff, and to check on upcoming tour dates, visit geoffnorcott.co.uk. For more on Jacob Hawley, who is set to return to Cambridge next year as a stop on his own tour, go to jacobhawley.co.uk.
