After four months of touring Jack Dee had played seventy-seven shows and been seen by 175000 people when he brought it to the Hammersmith Apollo in 2002. This is that show and Dee covers his thoughts on the internet, prostate problems, old people, children and other topics that get his goat.
I came to this film almost five years after it came out and in some regards the weaknesses are my fault because some of the material has been undercut by time. I'm not a massive Jack Dee fan anyway and it was only watching him weekly in Lead Balloon that made me dip back into some of his stand-up material. His approach has always been to be acerbic and grumpy but in this show he doesn't just play that to the hilt but does rather soften his observations at points. This does make his bitterer (which spell-check assures me is a word) stuff funnier because it does feel like a step up in delivery and not just the standard.
His observations are mostly pretty good. It was only really a lengthy section on computers and the internet where he came over as weak because his observations didn't carry much weight. It is always the way with some of these things because when you say "you know how
.", you really need the audience to be thinking "yes", not "well - no". With the computers stuff I think his observations were probably out of date even in 2002 but I'll be kind and say that they didn't work for me just because technology has moved on since he did this show. Dee's delivery is good and he does well to engage with the audience, which is quite some feat when you look at the size of the Apollo and how many people are in there. He is the centre of the attention and it is amazing that the stage becomes small because you forget that he is the only thing on it or rather you forget about the bits of the stage that he is not on.
Overall then an enjoyable and funny show even if it is not all brilliant and some of the observations have been voided by the march of technological progress. Regardless, fans will love it.
