You Me Bum Bum Train, Adam Riches & John Kearns - Mark Muldoon's Comedy Diary

Written by: Mark Muldoon
Published: Thursday 19th December 2024

Imagine arriving for a theatre show, but you're led, alone, into a boardroom where it quickly becomes apparent that you're a powerful press baron negotiating 2,000 redundancies with a furious union leader. 15 seconds later, you're a street sweeper in your manager's office being shouted at for not sweeping roads fast enough. In the next room, you seem to be a tiny child as a playroom towers around you. Like whiplash, moments later you're an air traffic controller trying to help a plane land in the middle of a storm.

You'll have to forgive me: none of these things happen in the latest version of You Me Bum Bum Train, but I'm under strict instructions to not reveal any specific details of the show, so I've had to make up some other plausible scenarios instead. And there are 25 of these scenes participants were (sometimes literally) thrown headfirst into, in a complex maze of rooms and passageways across several floors of a central London office block - the whole thing brought to life by a cast of 400 (!) people, all of whom are volunteering, yet who perform with a level of professional skill that ensures you'd never be able to tell.

You Me Bum Bum Train - first staged in Brighton in 2004 - is a staggering institution. If a scene is set in a foreign country, they'll ensure, say, that the ceiling fan is a popular brand of ceiling fan from that country. Will a single participant (or, as Bum Bum Train refers to each of us, 'passenger') notice? Pretty damn unlikely. But there can be no scrimping on the meticulous attention to detail here.

Accordingly, only 70 people can experience the show each night. To say tickets are hard to come by is like saying Nigel Farage occasionally comes across as a bit right wing. You leave with newfound empathy, alongside a sense of feeling astonishingly privileged to have got to experience this grand tribute to all that is possible in - and all that is to be cherished about - the arts.

Eight years ago - the last time they staged a production - I volunteered as one of those 400ish people, in part just to get the full gossip on everything that show entailed. But even without that I recommend you do the same, to see such a remarkable creative undertaking up close (no experience is necessary, they'll find a role for everybody who fancies it).

Meanwhile in more conventional comedy circles, two titans of the scene Adam Riches and John Kearns (the latter best known from Taskmaster) have, somewhat surprisingly, teamed up for a show where they play "one of music's most bangable duos" Michael Ball and Alfie Boe. Or "the most successful musical double act no-one you know has ever seen".

And it's a pure delight from start to finish, with skilled humour scattered liberally throughout a pitch-perfect narrative thread. The show more resembles the blueprint of a typical Riches show: knockabout silliness here, creative set pieces there. Riches plays Ball as a self-centred, sleazy, perma-horny alpha (again, not exactly dissimilar to characters he's embodied on stage previously). Kearns is his put-upon, beta male equivalent Boe. Keep an eye out for last minute ticket availability, or if we're really lucky, new dates.

Read previous editions of this column (featuring Taskmaster: The Live Experience, The Rest is Entertainment Live, A Christmas Carol (ish) and Flo & Joan's One Man Musical).

Mark Muldoon is also available on Instagram and Bluesky. He didn't do embarrassingly badly in too many Bum Bum Train rooms.