The Nearest Thing to Tiswas Live!
Don't volunteer unless you are prepared to get messy!
With all the talk from the Secret Diary screening of how to make sploshing part of your sex life, how refreshing to see a live show that demonstrates slapstick doing what it does best – being funny! And yes, it is messy – and yes there are women on the receiving end, and if the audience in Hastings was anything to go by, it could do as much to make your partner want to take part as any drama on ITV2. Circus Hilarious is simply that – hilarious, and if you don’t believe me, ask my clown-hating mate Jenny who loved every minute!
Circus Hilarious is the wet-and-messy brainchild of former Tiswas regular Clive Webb and stars him and his son, Danny, with a cast of clowns, musicians and female dancers (who, I’m delighted to say, join in the slapstick). The show is an incredible mixture of comedy, magic (yes proper big illusions), circus acts, music and dance (thankfully very little) all set on stage in a comfy theatre rather than forcing its audience to endure the hard drafty benches of the big top. And frankly it works very well. Where else can you see classic slapstick routines alongside inflatable Elvis impressions, ball-balancing, an brilliant Titanic piss-take, plenty of Carry-On-style jokes and messy audience involvement that leaves even those not on stage rather damper than when they went in!
The idea is 15-years-old now but thankfully shows no sign of growing up! The two stars are Clive and Danny – Clive as the ringmaster/straightman/magician and Danny the clown (with 100 other circus skills) who tread a clever tightrope between adult and children’s humour that leaves them loved by both (just watch the Mums swoon over Danny who, beneath the thankfully minimal make-up, is very good looking and buff as fuck!). So expect plenty of innuendo, fart and poo jokes for the kids, knob gags for the grown-ups, and slapstick, oh yes, plenty of slapstick!
Where else can you dress as a Teletubby and get pied and electrocuted?
Welcome back to the wonderful world of political incorrectness where dancers with short skirts are likely to get foam squirted down their cleavage or sprayed up their short skirts. Where the audience is invited on stage to be given electric shocks from their stools and then pied – whilst dressed as teletubbies! Where pianos explode, old men fart from fake bare bums, and our inflatable Elvis (Danny again) falls off stage, can’t get up in his costume so runs off into the audience in his underpants. It’s as close as you’ll get to Tiswas live – but with all the skill of the circus. This IS what they want. And a Hastings audience on a wet, windy Tuesday afternoon in February loved every minute!
Clive & Danny do one of the messiest decorating scenes ever
I first saw Circus Hilarious with Hayley a few years ago also at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings. The cast was smaller then but, boy, was it memorable. The pretty female singer was pied within the first minute and the first half closed with the messiest decorating scene I’ve ever witnessed. Slosh and water wasn’t just poured it was thrown around the stage (and over the audience!) leaving almost everyone and everything splattered. One woman’s day was made when Danny ran into the audience to give her a messy hug – and Hayley sulked cos it wasn’t her!
"It should have been me!" Hayley sulked when an audience member got hugged.
The current show isn’t quite as messy as this but it is slicker and funnier. The audience still gets involved whether they want to or not! You can volunteer for the teletubby routine where everyone who takes part gets a pie - and the female volunteer gets six! Or you can stay in your seat and find yourself being squirted with super soakers and drenched (well dampened) by buckets of water thrown from the stage.
Being a singer with Circus Hilarious requires tolerance...
But perhaps the best mess in the current run is reserved for the female singer in the Titanic routine. In a short, low-cut dress, the pretty blonde gamely sings that Celine Dion theme from the film whilst being first attacked with a snow blower full of tissue,
...a fondness for water...
then squirted in the face, boobs and up the skirt with a Supersoaker and then getting the same treatment with spray foam bringing back memories of that famous Freddie Starr sketch in the 70s.
...and the ability to sing whilst sprayed with foam.
As if that isn’t indignity enough, she is then treated to a blast of compressed air right between the legs! Not only did the game girl in our show keep singing despite her sploshing she even found time to fix the radio mike at the same time! Now, that’s a trooper!
Celine Dion never had this problem!
You can also enjoy other classic slapstick/knockabout sketches as Norman Wisdom’s “Learning the Drums” routine, Charlie Drake’s plate factory sketch (recently revived by Cannon & Ball but done better here) and a surreal boxing skit that was probably the only bit in my first visit that didn’t quite work. With pantos cutting back on slapstick, where else can you see brilliantly crafted routines like that these days? We should do everything we can to keep them alive.
So get off your arse (and the internet) and go! Circus Hilarious’s dates for this year include..
27th Feb: Bedworth Civic Hall
28thFeb: Grand Theatre, Lancaster
21st Mar: Theatre Royal, St Helens
27th Mar The Muni, Colne
29th Mar: Solway Civic Theatre, Whitehaven
2nd Apr-7th Apr Hippodrome, Gt Yarmouth
8th Apr: Woodville Hals, Gravesend
9th Apr: Broadway Theatre, Catford
24th Apr: Theatre Royal, Newcastle
2nd & 3rd May: Pavillion Theatre, Worthing
And occasionally they do an even bigger, messier version of their act in circuses, clips from which can be seen in their two DVDs on sale at their gigs (and with no theatre upholstery to worry about, the audience really do cop it there!).
Hat's entertainment!
Sorry if this review has gone on a bit, but shows like this deserve all the publicity they can get. Your kids will love it and so will you. Jenny has become such a fan she quotes the jokes and catchphrases all the time and has joined their Facebook site (despite being sung to by Clive and insulted – “Hey, you picked an ugly one!” – by Danny) – and Hayley would run away on tour with them if she could! And we are not alone. On their website (www.circushilarious.co.uk) there is a guest book where audience members can leave comments on the show. One is from a 21-year-old couple who saw the show (and loved it) at the Grand in Wolverhampton on the Sunday before the show came to Hastings. It was their Valentine’s Day present to each other!
For sharing a love of slapstick with your partner, Billie Piper’s scene will have to go a long way to beat that!
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