Harry Hill ✑ Pedigree Fun

Zak Ferguson 🤣Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of Five stars.

The last time I went to watch a stand-up comedian Live was at the beginning of 2016 to see Julian Clary in Eastbourne with a drugged up Mother beside me, who happened to also not an hour out of court – she was drowsy and leg jittery, falling in and out of consciousness beside me/off and on awakening and then openly wincing and stating far too loudly in all the wrong silent spots of Julian's act, that the show was, "Too gay!" Yes, the show is called The Joy Of Mincing, about a notorious homosexual camp act - but, my mother, she is known for being a bit of dumb bitch on top of world’s worst Mother as well. She was constantly nodding back off and then waking up thinking Julian was paying attention especially to her; though being at the furthest row - the back-back row, where your laugh will never reach the performer let alone spot a 48 year old off-her tits nearly got charged with GBH mother waving coquettishly at a notorious gay. It was pathetic. But also funnier than the act itself. It was an odd evening, a bit meh, with a few archival tinned laughter-ha-ha’s issuing from myself and pretty much all there. The theatre was filled with hahaha’ s used merely to fill a silence, you know, to fill in the gaps. In minor spots the show was minorly decent. Clary was just, well, sapped off all energy and care. Also, he obviously hated where he was.

But what really stands out to me, experience wise was my first stand-up show, back 2013, that was Harry Hill’s Sausage Time. I was no doubt very excited and anxious before going in. I'm not one to go into confined spaces and have obnoxious non-entities ruin something I forked out 36 quid for. Something I still loathe to do. I hate seeing movies because there is always one dip-shit that needs the plot explained, Loudly, to them, by an even Louder, yet contradictorily whispering partner. That and I wasn't used to laughing out loud. Suppressed emotions I guess? You choose for me.

I don't laugh out loud. It just isn't something I have ever done. (Well that changed after watching Sausage Time). Harry Hill just taps into something in me. As a creative and, I don't mind coming across as rather “ohhh look at moi”, someone with a vast, varying wide range of humour. I get all forms of comedy. For all different spastic reasons.

I love all forms of comedy. Whether I laugh aloud or not doesn't signify the quality.

But, Harry Hill makes me laugh loud and with meaning.

Aged 18 me and my mate we had booked ourselves to see Harry Hill's Sausage Time as soon as we could. We got the cheap-seats, yet still at least we weren’t the poor fuckers sat behind a hundred year old stone beam. I did notice he laughed directly into the cracked plaster as if the beam was the source of the nights entertainment. Me and my old mate Max, were going in expecting the usual - that of which we had grown up and in love with. Harry Hill, if you're not familiar with is a stand-up comedian, and TV legend and an overall familiar face and voice, that the nation loves, loathes or couldn't give two flying custard pies over.

Both me and my mate loved Harry Hill. He was part of not just our childhood but also part of our maturation, in 2013, because seeing a 16+ Harry Hill rated show meant, well, that we were aging alongside Harry and going to experience his edgier side. That and what is more mature than seeing your first stand-up gig alongside a mate without a parent in tow?

We were becoming "men".

Me more so than my virginal friend at the time. Sorry not sorry, Max. Don't care anyway, guys a douche now.

For myself, I grew up on Harry Hill. I knew him like the majority of my age group, from Harry Hill's seminal and hilarious TV Burp series and Harry Hill's Shark Infested Custard shown on CITV.

Before I witnessed Harry Hill the quite edgy, cheeky, stand-up, I knew him to be a silly, playful, artful man; prone to using homemade props that looked like they had been nabbed from his own studio at home, used to their full potential and effect.

The man is just an oddity. A high collared, highly pump-shoed bespectacled anarchic mad man. Possessing an energy like no other.

Harry Hill is extremely unique. He melds the surreal, the silly, the observational, the musical all so wonderfully together into a melting pot of Hill-gloop. Also, the guy is an imaginative idea-machine.

He has dabbled in not only stand-up and TV. He has written books, for YA And adults alike, he has also illustrated his own books, most notable and my personal favourite being The Further Adventures of the Queen's Mum; he has worked on a West-End musical that bombed, called, I Can't Sing! he has toured and released many stand-up DVDs. He recently released his biography which I totally adored.

He is always working or doing something.

He also got his fabulous feature film, The Harry Hill Movie released in 2013. A movie that was fitting the trend of adapting sitcoms or the characters therein into feature film territory. Giving them the Golden Screen sheen. Much to audiences chagrin. And unlike most stand-up or TV series names/ "icons" of the 2010s and their Big Movies, that seemed to be shat out on their behalf (Keith Lemon had a movie. Alan Partridge had a movie, which is the best of them all. Mrs Browns Boys got a movie, holy fuck did he/she) Harry's didn't suck. It was pure HH anarchy and more. I loved it. Still do.

What am I getting at?

Hill has spent decades not quite reaching the top, not since TV Burp, but he tries and tries again.

What carried across initially in Sausage Time was that Harry Hill aesthetic. The designs. The characters we had grown fond of, like Gary, Harry's wooden ventriloquist son and all of that energy and zip. It was everything you got from the TV appearances and various properties he created or had a hand in re-envisioning, but with a harsher and brutal side.

I was in hysterics and loved every single minute.

Ten years later he is back. On tour. Live on stage. Doing his usual shtick and oh so wackily.

What I loved before hasn't gone away. Harry also seemed more unhinged than usual. More excitable and ready to shoot off and leave skid marks in his wake.

A lot of people, they gravitate to Harry Hill because he is heavily ingrained in modern day television. He presents Junior Bake-off. He has narrated You've Been Framed for nearly 15 years. He is known for his early 90s to early 90s The Harry Hill Show, also the aforementioned series TV Burp, where Harry Hill riffed and spoofed the previous weeks’ worth of telly, which is beloved and mightily missed. They like to be as close to what they deem a known quantity and celebrity, by mere association.

I know this because half the audience who left this show, Pedigree Fun, seemed confused to what they watched.

Many were scratching their heads stating, "It's just...it's just...stupid!"

One man was very brash and yelled as his chain-smoking wheelchair bound Mother, melting like rubber into her seat, puffing on fags as if they were her oxygen, "He Is Not Funny Mum! He Is Silly! Silly! Silly! Silly!"

The Mother replied in a crackling 1950s radio host drawl, "Tis silly and funny, Mark!"

I couldn't agree more. She got it.

So fuck off Mark.

I scoffed and rolled me eyes as I puffed on my vape. Of course it is, It Is Harry Hill. Some seemed conflicted, as if they had laughed wrongly at him or his jokes and mad-gags and prop-anarchy. As if they laughed at something they might feel in the outside world isn't actually funny and was undeserving. I really thought this was going to make many repent and go to the local church after and sing a hymn or pray away the Harry Hill sin. They all had an existential crisis, as if they needed to rationalise why they laughed.

It was quite pitiful to be honest, to watch and hear. Being a Harry Hill fan boy I felt they needed to either leave, do their research or, actually get a clue what Harry Hill is outside of, "Oh he is on thee telly ain't he? Ooooo, on dee TV, I wanna see him!" merely for that reason rather than, going to enjoy the show and get with the vibe.

It was almost as if, away from that hive and weird raucous energy produced from any form of stand-up or gig environment and atmosphere, to join in the whimsy and rippled wave of Hill-gloop, they needed to work it out amongst themselves.

It doesn't take much thinking.

Harry Hill is silly. Stupidly sophisticated in his humour and wit and the physical comedy and slapstick, nigh on Charlie Chaplin levels of physical spasticity and the ingenuity of it all, it was all on offer with Pedigree Fun.

The show was unexpectedly edgy, in a sense that Hill was quite on a raging roll in relation to certain celebs and political figures.

We get the mention of Covid, Hill entering on stage with a mask that, when he spoke opened like a weird sock puppet. It has his usual blundering buffoonery going on. He has again so much material interweaved with audience participation, you never know where it is going to go, then you do, as he re-enacts the same gag, again, only throwing a spanner into the works whilst he is doing it.

The whole thing with his 30 foot sock and having an audience member pull it off was manic, unexpectedly wild, and in my theatre having himself literally dragged almost off the stage in the audience members determined tug of war with Hill's Black and yellow striped sock; now that was gut-achingly funny.

Sometimes my mind drifted as one gag or joke took its time to actually culminate, something that Hill likes/loves to do, to then swiftly top it off with a mundane ending and shrug.

It is vapid. Silly. Fast-paced. This was a welcome return. Enough call-backs and Hillian madness and silliness to tide you over, with new material that, for me felt like a natural evolution from what he did with TV Burp, something Hill has for years never attempted to outdo or redo, feeling that was the height of his genius.

He is naturally sending out his attenuating antennas, feeling the atmosphere and testing the limits, the Hill-ian limits per say, to test the status quo of the pop culturally evolved society we have become. Seeing if it will be rejoiced and enjoyed. I'd say so, yes.

You can tell the guy loves to be on stage, loves the participation and glee of the audience and the glee he gets from rinsing people and being on stage. He is alive and sweaty and energetic and so marvellous to witness on stage.

Pedigree Fun was definitely a share and tear.*

*reference to a long running gag in the act.

🕮 Zak Ferguson is a co-founder of Sweat Drenched Press and the author of books like Soft Tissues, Dimension Whores and One Of These Days