On Wednesday night in what must be the most unkempt venue in Liverpool (or at least the one as far removed from the image it’s name would depict), myself, Fliss, and a bunch of friends from my work went along to see Dylan Moran’s Like, Totally set.
I didn’t know who Dylan Moran was when Graeme had asked me if I wanted a ticket, but the suggestion that he was a “comedian” was good enough for me.
It’s been a couple of years since we went to see the brilliant Bill Bailey at the same venue, so if it had any chance of being as good a show I was definitely up for it. At £17 a ticket I think I had every right to expect as polished a performance as Bill Bailey had delivered, too.
Not so. Dylan Moran turned out to be a drunken, stuttering, smoking disappointment of an act. Most of his material I’d heard many times before in one form or another in either comedy clubs or on stand up shows on tv. Along with the lack of originality came his inability to follow the thread of his own performance – all too often I thought he was going somewhere, but no, I should have set my sights lower.
As act two wore on, Moran became either increasingly drunk or increasingly aware that his performance probably wasn’t worth prolonging. When he asked for questions from the audience, one wag shouted Are you tired?. To which Moran replied that yes, he was tired, and that he was probably going to wind things up pretty soon. That he did and, after a pointless encore that did little to tie up his ramblings, we gratefully left for a pub nearby.
I’ll conclude by saying that although I laughed at a few things during the first half, my sides were never in any real danger of splitting. And, unlike with Bill Bailey, I haven’t found myself recalling the highlights in the days that followed. Which can only mean that there weren’t any.