Thirty years on, The Fast Show still measures up

An Evening with The Fast Show

Warwick Arts Centre

★★★★★

If “Jumpers for goalposts”, “Suit you, sir”, and “Nice!” don’t bring a swift smile of recognition to your lips, you’re clearly still not yet up to speed with The Fast Show.

In which case, watching this gathering of the TV sketch show’s principal alumni 30 years after it first aired may feel like attending the reunion of a school you never went to, with endless in-jokes.

That said, it’s possible for the uninitiated to come away from this anniversary tie-in firmly grasping why The Fast Show was one of the best things to happen to British comedy in the 1990s, in turn helping to spur on the likes of The League of Gentlemen, Little Britain and Catherine Tate.

Indeed, just as the series broke the mould by crunching the sketch format into its most succinct form – on, contextual set-up, recycled signature gag, off! – so this stage show becomes an unconventional hybrid that uses its participants’ shape-shifting skills while factoring in their advancing years.

With charismatic co-creators Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse, both 65, kicking things off – the former deadpan bland, the latter lurching on, champagne bottle in hand, as the rakish “13th Duke of Wybourne” – the troupe (completed by Simon Day, John Thomson, Arabella Weir and Mark Williams) make their presences felt, reaching as required for wigs and costumes.

It’s a lo-fi theatrical answer to a species of entertainment tailormade for TV but proceeds slickly enough. In fact, shorn of much embellishment, you realise how, despite being of their period, so many of the characters seem timeless, almost like crystalised, incorrigible attitudes. The pervy “suit you” tailors are the last word in a type of shop assistant who thrives on customer discomfort. And Whitehouse’s pièce de résistance, catchphrase-crazy music hall act Arthur Atkinson, winks both at bygone and enduring comic tastes.

With the late, great Caroline Aherne movingly honoured in a clip compilation, Weir keeps her end up with “Does my bum look big in this?” and more, while dishing out feminist complaints. Her blokey co-stars’ main line of defence being their mocking of male inadequacy too, whether in the chauvinism of Swiss Toni, or the infantilism of football pundit Ron Manager. Not all of it works, but as Manager might say of this nostalgic delight: “Marvellous, isn’t it? Wasn’t it?” Indeed it was.

Tours until Apr 14; thefastshow.live

Tailored for the stage: Kenneth (Mark Williams) and Ken (Paul Whitehouse)