Is he funny, or is his comedy the nadir of western civilisation? Not being a close follower of the storied TV career of Leigh Francis, AKA Keith Lemon, I arrived at his maiden live show an agnostic in this lively critical conversation. Reader, I am agnostic no more. My First Time is not a show for the comedy connoisseur, nor for anyone whose sense of humour occasionally strays above the waistband. Francis’s comic enthusiasms are perhaps best distilled in the words of his Urban Fox alter ego shortly prior to engaging in vulpine sex: “I love a shitty bum bum.”
Lest I understate the 50-year-old’s range, I must concede: he also loves a wank joke. The show revives an assortment of characters, usually rubber-masked, from Francis’s small-screen output, from celebrity stalker Avid Merrion, visiting the present day from 2004, via Keith Lemon himself, to Amanda Holden’s supposed gran Myrtle. These personae, like Francis’s celebrity impressions (David Dickinson, Stephen Mulhern, Louis Theroux), variously burp, fart, drink “bin juice” and talk porn. Joe Wicks appears, and shits himself. Dec “bums” Ant with a TV award. James Corden licks Adele’s arsehole.
It’s all cacophonously loud, with the emphasis on cack. Francis is a capable performer, brash, slightly bullying, without charm or subtlety. Video interludes book-end each sketch. As two audience members are invited on stage to “fuck a balloon”, and another to recite a smutty children’s story, I began to think: is there more to this than there seems? But contorting myself to give credit to Francis’s creative project, to situate his scatological vision somewhere on the spectrum between Ubu Roi and The Human Centipede, didn’t get me very far. The jokes were still predictable, repetitive and unimaginative.
Flickers of interest? There were a few. Hostile audience booing at the idea, as expressed to the time-travelling Merrion, that “there’s a lot you can’t say and do any more” in 2024. Some musical mimicry by Jess Robinson, one of Francis’s two co-stars. The show briefly being stopped while unruly audience members were made to leave. To really punish them, they should have been made to stay.
