The Horne Section, Maisie Adam, Rhys Nicholson, Ed Night - Mark Muldoon's Comedy Diary

Written by: Mark Muldoon
Published: Monday 28th October 2024

Even if you're ambivalent about the man himself, you have to sometimes step back and admire the work ethic of Little Alex Horne. One assumes the global success of Taskmaster both keeps him busy and has brought him an extremely comfortable level of wealth, yet still he continues with numerous side projects - No More Jockeys and Bad Golf, as well as continuing to be a director of non-league football team Chesham United, and alongside all that, he continues to regularly act as band leader of The Horne Section. And that's before we've even got to that same band's Channel 4 sitcom.

They've been performing together for nearly 15 years, and a pre-fame Little Alex Horne could be found performing with The Horne Section at the Edinburgh Fringe, presenting shows that weren't so much exclusively musical comedy, as homages to broad light entertainment formats of the past.

It's easy to still see that element of their work in their current tour The Horne Section's Hit Show, which fully indulges its traditional variety stylings, in what feels like quite a rare manner. So alongside comedy songs, there's Taskmaster tasks for the audience and even, at one stage, magic. There's also wordplay. A substantial amount of wordplay. But importantly, the show gets away without feeling embarrassingly retrograde. This is in part due to Little Alex Horne's gift for understated off-the-cuff comic ingenuity, which has an ability to inject life into any ideas in danger of flatlining.

Little Alex Horne also has a way of getting in criticisms of the show before you've had the chance, which adds to the show's self-awareness. "This show is about nothing at all" he pronounces at the end, as if the fact needed underlining. Its own brand of humour is enough: gentle, Radio 4-esque comedy for a Radio 4-esque audience, a fact which shouldn't be taken as a criticism. It's a superior example of the form.

Given how many comedians are now in the habit of filming audience interactions so highlights can later be published to social media, it's something of a surprise to note that Maisie Adam hasn't keenly joined their ranks. Fairly unusually, she warms up her audience before the interval with a full 30 minutes dedicated to the discipline. The results? Outright phenomenal.

Let's spread the credit for that 50/50, as the audience at Leicester Square Theatre are (highly rare, this) themselves hilarious. Not to mention endearingly loopy. Maisie takes full advantage though, capitalising on every quirk or comeback in order to create genuine crowdwork gold.

It'd be difficult for the rest of the show to live up to that magic, though there's certainly highlights, as Maisie comments on the fact that she's now married, so everybody is relentlessly asking her when she's going to have a baby (she's undecided about the whole idea, as things stand). There's also a winning story centred on her hen do in a country cottage. Elsewhere, any more middling material is papered over by delivery that benefits from Maisie's considerable charm.

The show - called Appraisal - supposedly takes the form of an appraisal of where Maisie has got to at this stage of her life. This is summed up in the closing moments by an unlikely source, in a theatrical flourish which manages to be original, yet a little uninspired. But still, those of us that witnessed that pre-interval crowdwork will comfortably consider it worth the ticket price alone.

Maisie isn't the only comedian rallying against being asked 'the kids question', and Rhys Nicholson is actually taking a stronger stance, arguing that people should just stop asking altogether. They're particularly good on the subject of their own non-binary gender, or during a longer tale about a kidney stone. Or, at one point, commenting how often people look terrible after having undergone cosmetic surgery. But this is an impressively consistent 80 minutes of comedy, which further burnishes the theory that Nicholson is deserving of considerably wider attention.

Finally, to Ed Night. Here's a sample quote from one of the London dates of his latest show:

"If you see anybody with a pen and a notepad, making notes during the show, don't be freaked out. I have a deal with a nearby prison where convicted child sex offenders on probation come and write an essay about a comedy show. To get them back into society".

That's pretty typical of the humour here: dark, but undeniably clever. This latest hour, The Plunge (which tours next year) sees Night take his act into edgelord territory, which does work for him: the humour is inventive yet always skillfully remains the right side of the line. It's five years since his last show, so it comes as a relief that this one is definitely his best yet. You may detect a little dip in quality as proceedings approach their conclusion and discussion turns to, say, Scooby Doo. But as Night toys with various neurodiversities, always maintaining superb command of proceedings, you're cheered to realise that this is comfortably his best show yet.

Read previous editions of this column (featuring Taskmaster: The Live Experience, Nish Kumar, Olga Koch, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Milton Jones).

Mark Muldoon is also available on Instagram and Twitter. He's never taking a notepad into an Ed Night show again.