A Christmas Carol (ish), Grace Campbell, Zainab Johnson - Mark Muldoon's Comedy Diary

Written by: Mark Muldoon
Published: Sunday 1st December 2024

Well, you have to feel for Nick Mohammed. Imagine spending 15 odd years working your way up through the comedy industry with a string of critically acclaimed shows, bagging starring roles in Ted Lasso and Taskmaster whilst also taking years to develop a big Christmas theatre show, then, when your moment finally comes, at the West End premiere - in front of family, friends, celebrities, press and the rest of the London comedy industry - a mysterious technical fault halts the production for about half an hour. Then a second long pause follows. At which point, the theatre decides to operate a free bar, which isn't an illogical way to keep a room on-side. The show starts up again, makes it through the first half, before stalling again after the interval. A short time later, the performance is cancelled.

All issues that had, thankfully, been ironed out of A Christmas Carol (ish) by the time we returned to the theatre a few nights later, but the damage to the show's financial health alone must be substantial.

The cast aren't displaying any visible signs of having had a particularly strenuous week. Mohammed heads up the production, in his regular guise of Mr Swallow. Except this time Mr Swallow is playing Scrooge. But Scrooge is also Santa Claus? From there it only gets more complicated, but relax: closely following this plot is far from necessary.

In a show that's prone to throwing extremely random ideas into the mix, it can be a struggle to believe that a creative team with comedy chops this good weren't able to come up with better ideas than the pantomime-esque sections that Scrooge/Swallow/Santa spends on holiday, or the festive singalong The Reindeer Song. Elsewhere, the performances sometimes have a slight clunkiness that you're not used to seeing in a West End production.

Perhaps that's not all fair, for a production that could hardly be accused of lacking ambition. They throw everything into the mix: song, dance, magic, rollerskating, audience participation, speedy costume changes, emotional ballads and appealing meta humour. The gorgeous, complex stage design by Fly Davis is exceptional.

There's certainly no shortage of excellent comic moments, and the show will, naturally, continue to bed in. Potty mouth oppositionists may wish to know that the dialogue features three shits, one piss and a dickhead (a sentence you can sing to the theme of The Twelve Days Of Christmas if you like). Despite that, it's still a show best enjoyed as a piece of Shrek-esque family entertainment. It's also - by some distance - better than all those typical pantomimes you'll see elsewhere at this time of year. You sense both of these may have been what they were aiming for with this production. It's aims they unquestionably achieve.

You may or may not be surprised to hear news of Grace Campbell playing the 3600-capacity Hammersmith Apollo. It's understandable if you're in the former camp: how has she managed it, despite having no particularly noteworthy TV credits to her name?

Well, it might be worth noting that she's amassed 159k Instagram followers for her mix of TMI #relatable millennial humour. Behold the riches that can befall those that truly nail social media. In a world where it continues to get harder for comedians to break through into mainstream TV, a new generation of comedians are largely ignoring 'legacy media', whilst still becoming huge.

And you can see the appeal. A Grace Campbell show deals with the kind of full-disclosure storytelling that makes groups of women in the audience crease with laughter, before exchanging knowing glances with each other. It's intriguing that Campbell has previously complained about how few men come and see her live. Fair enough, though given how squarely her material is targeted at young women it feels a bit like Elle magazine deciding to complain that their readership doesn't follow a 50/50 gender split.

So Campbell is open, in this show, about her own irrationality. She undergoes drug mishaps and, of course, navigates an often-unpleasant dating scene. Campbell is very good at all of this. Be under no doubt that she's a skilled comic, but it also can't be questioned that she has colourful stories to tell - stories where, crucially, she usually ends up as the one being embarrassed. That allows her to pull off the impressive trick of being open about her privileged life - living near Hampstead Heath, visits to Soho House, being the literal daughter of New Labour supremo turned podcaster Alastair Campbell - whilst still being a likeable, relatable figure to her audience.

A little too often she closes a line of thinking with something more likely to draw agreeable cheering from the audience, rather than laughter. A so-so running joke about German translations is also given far too much airspace. But this show, Grace Campbell Is On Heat, feels like an even-more-excavating 2024 update of Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman, for its canter through all the topics women have traditionally been told they can't talk about in polite company.

Still pining for comedians to tackle the tragically under-explored topic of dating? Harlem comic Zainab Johnson's got your back.

In fairness, she brings fresh perspective to the topic. Which is also true when Johnson (479k Instagram followers) discusses her gun ownership - a topic, which, it's fair to say, British comedy audiences are somewhat less used to hearing about. Both of those sections - alongside her chats with her audience - have the power to electrify, but you may still find yourself loving Johnson, whilst also feeling like this isn't quite the show for her. It could do with cantering through more themes, keeping the pace much snappier. Never is this more true than during a very lengthy closing story about, erm, an opossum. By the end Johnson has added smart justification for this meandering, but it doesn't come close to making up for how distinctly underwhelming the story felt as it was being told. Amazon Prime put out her last special. If they do the same for this show, I still warmly recommend the first 40 minutes.

Read previous editions of this column (featuring Taskmaster: The Live Experience, Fern Brady, Maisie Adam, Natalie Palamides and Nish Kumar).

Mark Muldoon is also available on Instagram and Bluesky. Yeah that's right, Bluesky! He's hoping his follower count hits double figures by the end of the year.