Mark Watson was running late. He ran straight up the stairs past his audience and panicked. He had to do something special, something we wouldn’t expect. The audience entered and Watson was nowhere to be seen. Is he in the box? Is he in the box of equipment? Yes. He is. This sets the standard for the next crazy hour of all of our lives.
Watson has the energy of a child who has had too much Ribena and like a tuned-in hawk his eye darted to anyone who dared to so much as shuffle towards the loo. We played games together and he hid the chair of a man who went to have a wee.Then he hid another member of the audience in the same box that he emerged from and by this point we weren’t sure what primary school hide and seek we had become involved in, but we loved it.
The jokes and stories are all in the delivery and Watson is well timed and hilarious every time. The show was accompanied by a constant underscore of laughter.Bravely, he asked his audience to text in questions, views and thoughts, but eventually this caught him out as someone realised they could call his phone, two days after they saw him, from Dylan Moran’s show. Brilliantly he bantered with and finally shot down hecklers, not just from his own audience, but also from audiences sat on the other side of Edinburgh too.
By the end we eventually saw his slightly spiteful side and in true camaraderie he gets the audience in to help. Having recently been messed around by a mortgage company, Watson sets out to ruin this mortgage lender’s life. Well here’s our contribution, Mark. Your pull quote from Broadway Baby: ‘Shame on you Paul Goddard.’ Do with it what you will.
