Happy Holidays

Check the listings on your travels: a comedian might be over there too.

Over the next few weeks we can look forward to a grand end-of-year TV tradition that never gets previewed by the bumper TV mags, because it happens between the actual shows. It's that few days when the festive commercial breaks switch from snowy ads about Christmas gifts and Boxing Day sales, to lovely sunny ones about potential holiday destinations.

One day you're watching an old Only Fools And Horses Christmas special interspersed with snowmen and Santas, the next it's Gavin & Stacey complete with cocktails and bikinis. And that latter crossover got us thinking: when you book a holiday, along with the beaches and balmy weather, does comedy ever enter the equation?

Perhaps it should, as in recent years the world has really opened up for gigging comics. Say you search here for a trip to Majorca - https://www.holidu.co.uk/holiday-lettings/spain/majorca - it might also be worth a quick google to see if any big-name comedians are in town during those few weeks. A couple of years ago Jimmy Carr turned up there, for example, on his self-explanatory The Best of Ultimate Gold, Greatest Hits World Tour.

"I'm really looking forward to coming to Majorca," he told a Palma-based newspaper. "Never been, a lot of my friends have, so I will spend a few days looking around, no doubt pick up some new material."

Which does raise the question: could he do any of that new Majorca material during a Greatest Hits show, or did he flag it up as separate new stuff beforehand? Either way, everyone's a winner. As Carr suggested, getting out of the UK is a bit of a busman's holiday, and can freshen up your sets.

There's a great bit on the excellent comic Alfie Brown's first album, Divorced from Reality (And My Wife), in which he talks about a show in Tenerife, which gives a good impression of the diverse range of comics playing shows in other lands.

As the critically-acclaimed Brown mentioned on that album, a few weeks after his gig the very different Roy 'Chubby' Brown was due to appear (presumably the club didn't just book comedians with that surname) and in a pub after the show he met the contentious internet comic Dapper Laughs. Which was all good for material. Plus the promoters threw in a free trip to a water park. You can see why comedians enjoy expanding their horizons.

Eddie Izzard is probably the pioneer of well-travelled UK comics, even doing whole sets in the native tongue, but language isn't such a barrier these days. Even acts doing wordy puns can probably tour beyond these shores, without causing loads of baffled looks. As Carr explained:

"I've found that, thanks to social media and the internet, people are watching comedians all round the world and always in English, they are not being dubbed," he said. "I've performed in over 34 countries and everyone has always understood me."

British comedy: it's the universal language.