For those Broadway Baby readers unfamiliar with him, Tommy Sheridan is a Scottish left-wing politician who successfully sued the News of the World for suggesting that he'd taken part in three-in-a-bed romps (and worse).
A hero to some, a fool to others, Sheridan is a divisive character who is now turning his hand to the chat show market for the Festival, having lost his Scottish Parliamentary seat (though he tells us the show was arranged before that happened).
Famous for his perma-tan (Scotland's answer to Robert Kilroy-Silk?), Sheridan appears with a sun-bed on stage, which has to be one of the best warm-ups of the Fringe. He chats to us before bringing out his guests, and this is one of the weirder parts of the show.
The opening material is pretty good, full of self-deprecating gags about his tan, his run-ins with the press, and his super-sized ego, but it's delivered with a politician's sense of timing, rather than a comic's and it feels misplaced. When he jokes about losing his deposit in a Glasgow massage parlour it just comes across as creepy. If you remember George Galloway meowing away in last year's Big Brother, you'll begin to get a flavour of this bit of the show - unmissable, but you want to be watching it from behind the safety of the sofa.
(Not the most right-on of comrades either, Sheridan recently joked on stage that black comedian Stephen K Amos wouldn't be needing the sun bed. Amos's drop-jawed reaction was one of the highlights of this year's festival for me).
Anyway, enough about him. Most chat shows stand or fall by the quality of the guests they attract, and here Tommy does ok.
On the night I was there, he had Scottish comic Des Clarke delivering ten minutes of his show in between the banter, plus Elaine C Smith discussing her politics and her career as an actor. They were followed by a couple of Scottish boxers who were interesting enough, but the only criticism I had of the guests is that they and Sheridan all hailed from the West of Scotland, giving it a rather parochial feel. A bit of Q&A from the audience was well handled, but just made it feel like an election meeting as we discussed school closures in Edinburgh.
The show feels like a continuation of the Cult of Sheridan by other means now that he's lost his seat, and he's certainly the only act I've seen (other than the odd Evangelical American choir) to address their audience as Brothers & Sisters. Sheridan's show is probably a hit with its target market of the Scottish left, and it's a good thing that he doesn't try too hard to appeal beyond that constituency as I'm not sure that we want foreigners knowing too much about our Tommy.
