Deer Shed Festival 2019 preview

Written by: Mark Muldoon
Published: Tuesday 14th May 2019

North Yorkshire's Deer Shed Festival, celebrating its tenth year, has successfully built a reputation for being a weekend that all the family really can enjoy. It's fair to say attention is lavished on kid-friendly entertainments, but the bigger stages tend to be far more boldly programmed than you might reasonably expect at a similar event. Take music: instead of your Razorlights, Snow Patrols and Clean Bandits, at Deer Shed you'd be better advised to expect a raft of acclaimed acts - critical darling Anna Calvi, adored off-kilter indie-pop hero Ezra Furman and hot Australian indie-rock prospects Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are your three headliners.

You could easily ignore all that racket and have a strongly comedy-focused weekend, however. Most notable perhaps is that for the first time the festival are putting on an over-16's only stand-up set, after the music headliners have finished. This honour falls - perhaps sensibly - to Reginald D Hunter, who is far more suited to a loose uncensored late-night scheduling than any other slot a family festival could presumably offer him.

Kids are welcome at the rest, such as at perennial audience favourite Nina Conti. Her bulletproof ventriloquism act should suit a tipsy festival crowd down to the ground.

Elsewhere, they've got quirky one-liner Milton Jones; and voice-of-millennials Kiri Pritchard-McLean, who seems like she's going to break through as a great mainstream star any day now. Meanwhile clever-stupid clown Tom Parry takes up some of the hosting duties, somewhat ideally.

A strong majority of adult attendees will have bought the kids along, sure. The festival has roughly a 50/50 adults/kids ratio. Comedians know this, although it's up to them the extent to which they self edit, as anybody who saw Brendon Burns' mid-afternoon show last year is unlikely to have forgotten.

Deer Shed's placement in the calendar means that you'll inevitably be hearing jokes that comedians are planning to take to the Edinburgh Fringe, but as this festival falls a week before that whole event kicks off, everybody's material should be pretty well honed by then.

Some A* acts from the comedy world are also littered across the rest of the programme. Chief amongst these is family show Beetlemania: Kafka for Kids, which mustn't be missed. Critically adored at last year's Fringe but otherwise somewhat overlooked due to being, well, perhaps something of a tricky marketing proposition, everybody who did see it raved about its ingenious yet silly awesomeness.

Meanwhile Foxdog Studios get the whole audience involved in their dazzling show using their own phones, and Sleeping Trees are a rock solid sketch group.

Then there's the spoken word programme, which features Richard Herring - the man incapable of having an unpodcasted thought; ace comedian and thoughtful philosopher Rob Auton; political thinker Akala (also performing music elsewhere on the bill), who's probably 'gone viral' in your social media feed at least once in the last few years; and up-and-coming Yorkshire-based impressionist Steff Todd.

Add 10,000 punters spread across a 90 acre site of forests, a lake, rolling hills etc and you've got a pretty solid festival proposition, all things considered. Regardless of whether you stick to seeing comedy or not.

Deer Shed Festival takes place at Baldersby Park, Topcliffe, on 26th to 28th July. Tickets are available from deershedfestival.com