It’s been a decade of tumultuous change since Harry Hill last toured. But for Hill, some corner of a comedy stage will forever be nonsense – a timeless land where rapping to the Crossroads theme, dressing up as an elephant and making ventriloquist’s dolls vomit always has a home. Pedigree Fun finds the 58-year-old neither looking nor acting a day older than when Sausage Time toured in 2013 – even if its cavalcade of idiocy doesn’t quite (or at least not tonight) scale the heights of its predecessor.
The only instance of Hill acting his age rather than his shoe size is with a running gag about the generation gap. Millennials and their juniors are teased wickedly about their meagre inheritance as he brags about the hardiness cultivated by a death-defying 70s upbringing. There is more wickedness in the mix than previous shows – see several Hitler jokes and a gag about the paedophile TV stars of yesteryear (“You’ve got to hand it to them, they were natural entertainers”).
This visual and verbal tomfoolery flows in such a spate that there’s always something coming to make you laugh. Hill tutors us in the four basic shapes of chicken nugget and mimes bathing himself with a wet-wipe, but the standout moments are the bigger set-pieces: casting an audience volunteer as a rescue elephant, say, then manoeuvring them into a slapstick duet with an ironing board. There’s a winningly freewheeling shaggy-dog story about a recipe box delivery, and – tonight’s undisputed showstopper – a socks-based physical comedy number that finds our host dragged, writhing, across the stage.
At such moments, a Harry Hill gig is just a joyous place to be. But there are a few fallow periods between the fertile ones here; moments when you can admire the dottiness of what Hill is doing (a non sequitur Coleridge recital, for example) without finding it especially funny. An oft-repeating onscreen joke dividing foodstuffs, famous people and more into “traybakes” or “tear-and-shares” overstays its welcome without ever really getting the audience on side. This isn’t always nonsense at its zenith, then, but a hoot all the same.
• Harry Hill: Pedigree Fun is at York Grand Opera House on 2 November; then touring.
