‘I’m going to talk about my holidays, then I’m going to show you some slides.” No one can accuse Griff Rhys Jones of overselling his solo show, Where Was I?, an Audience With-style evening in which he reflects on a life of TV travel. The jokes at his own expense come faster than the rapids on the River Tay, just one of Jones’s adventures in the name of professional globetrotting. It’s as if this most blitheringly English of Welshmen is trying to excuse himself for having been paid to travel the world.
If judged by his account here, Jones brought no particular skill to his telly peregrinations, just a dose of pluck and a readiness to play the fall guy over and over again. Frequently, his efforts to climb a sheer rockface, tightrope-walk on a mountain ridge or dangle from the roof of a 30-storey building (even the clip gives you vertigo) are maligned by his director or outdone by a far braver cameraman. A running joke is made of our hapless, bruised or sodden presenter being asked “Griff, can you give us a look of triumph?” when at a humiliatingly low ebb.
There is something of the slideshow about the whole event, as – in Act One at least – Jones gives us the backstory then stands aside while the TV footage screens. That gives proceedings a slightly faltering rhythm, as does Jones’s delivery, which veers between staccato bursts of chatter and long, distracted pauses. With his shock hair, sudden stares and odd locution, he can seem a caricature of eccentricity. Sometimes, you think he’s about to blank a line. At other times, the apparent absent-mindedness is just comic technique in action, as with the silence that precedes the punchline when a BBC producer tells him “we’ve been following your career with interest” – long pause – “Mel”.
If the first half is amiable chat, ranging across Jones’s TV series about mountains, rivers and cleaning the windows of skyscrapers, the second half more closely resembles standup. Not too closely, mind: Jones delivers half of it from an armchair. But it contains more identifiable jokes, and more curmudgeonly ranting – much of it on air travel, a familiar comic bugbear. Here, Jones discusses how life as “a television traveller” has spoilt him for holidays, as he recounts trips to the Galápagos with his wife and failing to stow “a sugar-sponge model of Mahon cathedral” in an overhead locker.
As well as accounts of individual adventures, the show’s publicity promises Jones’s philosophy of travel – on which count it only just delivers. He reflects on how the culture of travel has changed since he was a boy, when the standard was set by Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday. And he conjures it all with fernweh – the yearning for a faraway place – before a sweet final story hints at what this restless chasing around the globe has all been for.
- At Waterside theatre, Aylesbury, Thursday and Farnham Maltings, Surrey, Friday. Then touring.
