Some people’s art evolves over time. If you’re waiting for Harry Hill’s to do so – curious, perhaps, to see what late-period Hill has in store – might I suggest you don’t hold your breath? The big-collared one is 60 now, and New Bits and Greatest Hits moves the dial not a jot on the formula that has, since the 1990s, made him one of our silliest and most joyful entertainers.
Perhaps you could identify a maturer sensibility in what passes for the theme of tonight’s nonsense, which anchors itself in a story about the death of Hill’s nan. But we’re some considerable distance from “trauma comedy”, as Hill uses the set-up mainly to justify loopy jokes about “bags for life” and his difficulty spelling nan’s name in flowers alongside the coffin.
The other running gag derives from a play on the phrase “hearing dog”, and culminates in one of those moments – in which Hill specialises – when you double-take at the daftness of what you’re watching on a stage. “This isn’t a dream, you know,” he reminds us at one point – shortly after he’s been balancing on an ironing board, blasting his own fleshy face with a leaf-blower, while a puppet bird flaps around him from the end of a fishing line.
Not everything here is that arresting. But it comes at you so pell-mell, in surprising shapes and sizes and always with devilry and delight on Hill’s part, that you’ll seldom stop chuckling for long. I will cherish his anecdote about an armed raid at an artisan butcher. So too a double-act with his ventriloquist’s dummy son, Gary, involving a performance of Sitting on the Dock of the Bay featuring a referee’s whistle inserted in the back of poor Gary’s head.
Other returning features of Hill shows gone by include Stouffer the cat, Wagbo – and there are inflatable sausages too. A Wheel of Jokes shares Harry’s finest absurdist one-liners from yesteryear. As their brilliance reminds you, beneath all this offhand, forever-young delinquency works a true comedy craftsman, chiselling away at funny to make it funnier still. Tonight, the yield is substantial.
• At the Haymarket, Basingstoke, tonight; New Theatre Royal Lincoln on Wednesday; then touring.
