Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
Have I Got News For York is the name of the University of York's take on the popular BBC comedy news quiz "Have I Got News For You". For those readers who have only recently arrived in Britain, or who have been living in a cave without a television, internet access or human contact for the past eleven years, "Have I Got News For You" is a panel show in which two teams led by Ian Hislop and Paul Merton make fun of the week's headlines whilst a guest host periodically interjects with innuendoes and jokes about Silvio Berlusconi. Hislop's knowledgeable wit and Merton's deadpan surrealism complement one another to create one of the most consistently funny panel shows in the history of British television. In attempting to emulate such a popular and successful programme, Have I Got News For York, or HIGNFY for short, had a lot to live up to and a lot to build from.
I was told the show would start at 7:30 so I arrived at V/045 at about twenty past seven. Before the show began I spent about twenty minutes frantically scribbling notes for an introduction, queuing, meeting fellow freshers who were desperate to feature in an online review and finding my seat. By the way, for anyone interested in the kind of do-or-die man that provides me with permission to write anything about him, their names are Tom, Joe, Daniel and "Karl Tomusk". The latter describes himself as "infuriatingly good looking".
The performance took place on a well-lit set of desks laid out in the same format as HIGNFY's TV forerunner. Sitting on the far left was team captain Charles Deane, a bearded comic with a brilliantly humorous Northern Irish accent. On the right of him was his team mate Tim Ellis who is YUSU President. Right of him, on the central desk sat the only woman in the show, the host Laura Anderson who leant back on her chair with confidence while talking and sipped intermittently on a pint of Blackthorns. Right of her was James Croydon, YUSU's Student Activities officer. On the far right sat sarcastic baritone comedian Josh Giles who has more hair than most women.
HIGNFY did an excellent job of mirroring the show it was based upon. It opened with a charmingly silly introductory cartoon in which the student newspapers bomb each other and radioactive material is dumped in the lake. The Berlusconi jokes, odd one out round and missing words round could almost have been written by the same team as "Have I Got News For You". The headline jokes had a more sustained pace and were funnier than those told by some professional comedians, and I heard and understood almost everything that was said.
If I have one complaint, and this really does feel like the furious nit-picking of a hyperactive chimpanzee, it is that some of the headline jokes had fairly obvious punchlines, for example "Fresher's week involves drunkenness, vomiting and sexual encounters with strangers, but don't worry, Willow is open all year!" This didn't matter since there was such great chemistry between all the panellists and the host as they built on one another's jokes. It was especially entertaining watching them collaborate in sketching stick figures on special pizza-holding bikes.
Overall it was a great show, well worth seeing.
I don't know where you've been, but HIGNFY's been running for 21 years. Good review, and I'm glad our HIGNFY hasn't been dimmed by the departures of the inimitable Rosie Fletcher, Max Tyler and Tommy Flynn.
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