Festival Comedy
THE BEAST IN ME Portugal’s TV legend Philberto graces us with his presence to explore the inner animal this Fringe. Here he picks his top five reality stars
SHAHBAZ (Big Brother 7, UK 2006) I’ve always been very scared of the people from Glasgow (it’s one of the themes of my show) and any idea I had of these people was broken when I saw this guy. People told me that I was an attention seeker but this guy was just insane. In his own way, he was beautiful, but broken. He burned like a sparkler for six days but then his spark went out and he threw himself from the house. What a fantastic maniac.
ISMO LEIKOLA (Tallihahdet, Finland 2008) Normally, in Finland, they are not too much with the emotions, very calm. This show is about stars being around animals and looking after them, making sure they are OK. This guy had to look after a horse but the horse wouldn’t do what he wanted. So he punched it really hard, was thrown out from the show and was in the front pages all the time. PHILBERTO CASTRO (ME) (Live on the Floor for a Month, Portugal 2007) I have to put one of my own in there. It was the romance between myself and Lucia, the moment that was in all of the papers in Portugal. During the ‘restriction’ task we were taped up from shoulders to knees, bound up like a worm and trying to kiss but had to move around on our stomach. As I tried to turn to kiss her, she hit me and I went down the steps, couldn’t stop, bang bang bang. But then she rolled down after me and it hurt her and me, but we still kissed. It looked funny but was tender for me.
VANILLA ICE (The Surreal Life, USA 2007) Vanilla Ice, or Robert Van Winkie which is his real name, had made a deal with Ron Jeremy (a hairy porno king) to vote for one of the others on the show. Ron swore on his mother’s grave that he wouldn’t go against Vanilla. Then he did and Vanilla WENT NUTS!!! I can understand because on my show Miguel was supposed to be my friend and everyone saw what he did. But Vanilla nearly broke a drumkit on the porno guy’s head. I wanted to have a hot chocolate with Vanilla but he would have been so angry probably he wouldn’t have listened good. DUTCH IDOL (Holland 2006) We know about the singing shows and how the very worst people at singing come through and everyone in the UK laughs at them, but this Dutch show was just amazing. They had the very worst competitors from the show and made them sing LIVE IN FRONT OF A PACKED FOOTBALL STADIUM. OK, on my show people saw me naked and crying but nothing, NOTHING is going to compare to the shit these people are going through. You have to see this on YouTube. You are going to be shouting an angry ‘WOW’ at the screen. (Interview by Brian Donaldson)
■ Philberto, Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, 9–30 Aug (not 18), 9.30pm, £8.50–£9.50 (£7–£8). Previews until 8 Aug, £5.
20 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 6–13 Aug 2009
list.co.uk/festival
OUT OF THE BAG They upset everyone at Mo Mowlam’s memorial but Jay Richardson finds that Dead Cat Bounce are now flying high
I f you’ve never actually met rock’n’roll sketch band Dead Cat Bounce, you could be forgiven for thinking that these guitar- wielding Dubliners occupy a place so far ahead of the curve that they’re on the outermost tip of the zeitgeist’s serrated edge. Their debut gig was attended by Will Ferrell and representatives of Irish broadcaster RTE, who subsequently handed them their own TV series, while their 2008 Fringe sketch show opened with stockbrokers standing over a dead prostitute. What savage, foresighted satire!
Sadly, their seemingly oblivious cool is only partially so. At the 2005 Fringe, Shane O’Brien gave a talent scout for Armando Iannucci the cold shoulder in favour of his pizza. Unconvinced by the man’s credentials, he preferred to focus on his dinner. And their name – which refers to the temporary rally of spectacularly falling stock – simply came from searching for to economic terms accompany the stockbroker sketch, and currently attracts millions of financial spam emails. With O’Brien on bass, Demian Fox on drums, Mick Cullinan on keyboards and James Walmsley on guitar and lead vocal, the quartet – who met at Dublin’s Trinity College – at least marry sharp sketch writing with a mastery of various musical styles, everything from barbershop to fist-pumping stadium rock. Nevertheless, they’ve had some spectacular foot in mouth incidents. Four years previously, as part of the sketch troupe H-BAM they engineered their own ‘Springtime for Hitler’ moment at a memorial concert for Mo Mowlam. London’s Theatre Royal had been staging The Producers at the time and in front
‘JEREMY IRONS JUST STOOD THERE, SADLY SHAKING HIS HEAD’
of an audience of 2500 they performed a sketch entitled ‘Graham and the Nazis’, in which a loud, flatulent fratboy crashes a Third Reich rally. A technical glitch led to a huge picture of Mowlam appearing on a screen just as two large swastikas unfurled on either side. O’Brien remembers ‘coming off in my Hitler costume and Jeremy Irons just standing there, sadly shaking his head. Even at the party afterwards, people like Lulu and Dawn French were just walking past, trying to avoid us.’ Luckily, Mowlam’s daughter filmed the whole debacle, so it should appear on the internet sooner or later.
Having juggled both a sketch show and radio play at last year’s Fringe, Wired finds them as ‘more a band than a sketch group,’ claims Walmsley. ‘Let’s just call it burlesque and get the nipple tassels out!’ rejoins O’Brien. ‘Actually, we did a sketch as strippers, but people just laughed at our bodies.’ With the Chippendales appearing in the same venue, perhaps they’ll collaborate? Cullinan sniggers: ‘A load of women on their hen night, and we rock in?’
Last year though, the group also employed O’Brien’s budgie to teach him responsibility. ‘We used to throw flyers on the floor and whichever show he landed on, we went to it. We’d go out at six in the evening and not come back until six in the morning. His cage was left open, but he’d have been awake all night, thinking “should I have gone to bed”?’ Dead Cat Bounce, Gilded Balloon Teviot, 622 6552, 8–30 Aug (not 17), 10.30pm, £8.50–£9.50 (£7.50–£8.50). Previews until 7 Aug, £5.