Neither standup show nor book tour, but an “animation” of her 2015 memoir, Spectacles – that’s how Sue Perkins describes this live outing, her first stage foray since the pre-Bake Off era. And so Spectacles Live joins that burgeoning pantheon of solo shows (Danny Baker is touring one too) whose hosts are obliged only to be themselves, entertainingly – cribbing material they’ve created for another medium, gossiping about starry chums and dusting off well-worn anecdotes in response to questions from their adoring crowds.
It’s as much celebrity appearance as comedy, in other words, with a few choice extracts from the autobiography thrown in. But it adds up to an enjoyable evening, and – via her family slideshow, self-deprecating stories of immature adulthood, and the inside track on Paul Hollywood’s genitals – Perkins emerges as that most essential of baking ingredients: a thoroughly good egg.
The first half focuses on her Croydon childhood. It’s an intense nostalgia hit for we children of the 70s, as Perkins screens brutal public information videos about child safety and recalls unglamorous family day trips to Brighton – or half-day trips, given dad had to be back in time for Grandstand. On an upstage screen, the psychedelic clothes, haircuts and wallpaper summon the age of the three-day week to pungent life – and Perkins scores many an easy laugh (“Round about this time, I started dressing to match the carpet”) at their expense.
If the volume of slides feels self-indulgent – we get a dozen of mum and dad’s wedding alone – we’re never far from another droll caption, like the one about her richly sun-bronzed grandparents being “made of teak”. At times, it’s laid on a bit thick. “Were we normal?” Perkins frets – to which the only answer, on this evidence at least, is a resounding yes. Elsewhere, one reading from her memoir finds Perkins overthinking her mum’s habit of hoarding Sue’s juvenilia, and in another about her school production of The Hobbit the heavy lifting is conspicuous as a mildly amusing story strains to transform into a big-hitting comic set-piece.
There’s certainly enough here to whet the appetite should Perkins – with or without sidekick Mel Giedroyc – ever create a new, bespoke live comedy show. Seven years after it began, Bake Off hasn’t pared her sharp edges: if she’s two parts sponge, she’s still one part knife. But killer comedy isn’t what tonight is about, as Act Two devolves into a talkback session with the audience. The Spanish Inquisition it’s not, as one woman asks, “Who’s your favourite Bake Off winner?” and another “Mel, Paul and Mary Berry: snog, marry, avoid?”
At the show’s nadir, this pitches us into the seventh circle of banality, as Perkins ruminates on the relative virtues of QI presenters (“I have a lot of respect and reverence for both of them”). Elsewhere, she uses inevitable queries about GBBO and her career plans as springboards into well-rehearsed tales of embarrassing cross-cultural encounters while filming travelogues, or of the Bake Off contestant who commemorated colonial Africa in gingerbread.
There’s spontaneity too, though – as with a faltering but honest answer about a book she’s hatching to explore celebrity, identity and her dad’s recent death. It sounds like Perkins’ hidden depths may soon reveal themselves. Until then, this is a pleasant paddle in the shallows.
- At the Anvil, Basingstoke, on 17 February and De Montfort Hall, Leicester, on 18 February. Then touring.
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