The Perrier Award committee is comedy's version of the football referee. Whichever shortlist of nominees they decide upon is roundly condemned every year as wrong - boring, safe, predictable, biased, corrupt, racist, sexist, homophobic, elitist, cowardly... As usual, the attacks are unfair; people are getting upset by who is not on the shortlist, rather than who is. Which, if nothing else, proves the comedy talent pool at the Fringe is not quite as shallow or as narrow as everyone says it is.
To recap, the five nominations this year are: Dave Gorman, Rich Hall, Lee Mack, Sean Lock and Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight. The last has received almost unanimous approval due to the fact that a) it was completely unknown before the festival, and thus counts as 'unpredictable'; b) the name on the poster sounds vaguely foreign, and is thus 'exotic'; c) it has a title other than the protagonist's name, and is thus 'unusual'; d) it's really funny and original.
Marenghi, the lead character, is a perfectly observed pulp-horror writer: deep-voiced, slick-back-haired, dark-suited and purple-tied, famed for his Slicer trilogy. With the aid of his publicist and two mime artists, Marenghi has adapted his novella about a horror writer with writer's block into an Edinburgh stage play in a doomed bid for the one thing that has always eluded him - critical acclaim. As a character, he is midway between the pathetically self-deluding Alan Partridge and the unwittingly hilarious portentousness of Spinal Tap 's Nigel.
Sharply written and performed, Wednesday night's show had the added value of a fire alarm. Marenghi, after half a second of looking fazed, went straight back into character and growled mysteriously: 'Fire - my old enemy!' Garth Marenghi is a character which could, like Al Murray's Pub Landlord , develop into something even darker and deeper in the next few years. Then again, it could follow horror tradition, in which case the sequels will be exploitative, self-referential shite. In either case, I'm looking forward to it.
The other four nominees suffer in comparison from being relatively established names and, more damningly, from having short, blokey names. The near-rhyme of 'Mack' and 'Lock', and indeed of 'Gorman' and 'boring', not to mention the utter commonality of Dave, Rich, Lee and Sean, is surefire proof that the comedy scene is a masculine closed shop, where only monosyllabic geezers are welcome.
This is, of course, miles from the truth. As I wrote in week one, Rich Hall's Otis Lee Crenshaw (the name of his alter-ego ex-con country singer) is a sublime union of comedy and music, daring and yet comfortingly warm. Dave Gorman's show, too, is intelligent, original and slightly insane. Lee Mack's New Bits is less inventive - it's basically a one-hour TV sketch show, slick and amusing but over-reliant on Mack's Coogan-esque anti-charm and a slew of televisual references. Sean Lock, meanwhile, is, like Harry Hill, surrealism lite - all off-the-wall observations and inappropriate facial expressions. Inoffensive, at worst.
The real outcry has arisen over the absentees from the shortlist - notably Auto boosh, who surely suffered a backlash as overwhelming pre-festival favourites, and Scott Capurro, whose show is essentially a mass slaughter of sacred cows. My personal favourite was Noble and Silver, by far the most inventive comedy act on the Fringe.
However, this is the problem with judgment by committee: artists who are controversial or unusual, who divide opinion and rile people, tend to suffer under the Perrier panel's proportional representation voting system.
This section went to press before the midnight announcement of the winner last night in Edinburgh. So here is my multiple-choice critical reaction (please delete as appropriate):
a) Rich Hall's success is fully deserved - he was by far the most naturally funny, linguistically rich, dizzyingly enjoyable act at the festival. Someone should buy him a seedy underground bar in south London so Otis Lee Crenshaw and his band can play all night every night in an atmosphere of bourbon, tears and 100 per cent humidity.
b) The decision to give the Perrier prize to Dave Gorman/ Lee Mack/ Sean Lock/ Garth Marengui's Fright Knight represents a massive failure of nerve on behalf of the Perrier panel. These people should be exposed for what they are - a white-bloke-dumb-heterosexual-mainstream-elitist bunch of corporate cocksuckers with pigs' ears for brains and Polo mints for eyes. May they rot in hell for their sins.
