Note: This review is from the 2016 Fringe

If the audience hadn’t extravagantly lined Craig Hill’s sporran with silver to gain entrance this evening, you could be forgiven for assuming a communal outbreak of Stockholm Syndrome was in effect.  For Hill’s entire routine is targeted abuse at his audience.  That is all.  For an hour.

No one can deny Hill’s energy and enthusiasm.  The man is a rainbow dervish from the second he bounds onto the stage, kilt twirling and arms aloft.  In fact, even if you surrendered to his style of comedy entirely, he would be exhausting.  Once his lack of anything resembling actual material becomes apparent however, it’s excruciating.

Hill’s brand of extravagantly camp bitchiness does have a time and a place; Butlins in 1976.  Despite being described as subversive in fawning puff pieces like this, his comedy is actually seriously reductive and retrograde.  He takes a complex, emotionally-charged subject like sexuality and wields it like a club.  So much of his act focuses on the assumed discomfort an openly gay man will arouse in heterosexuals, it’s embarrassing.  It’s the sexual equivalent of Charlie Williams threatening to move in next door.

If Hill had the jokes to back up his persona it would be a more palatable way to spend an evening.  However, while it’s acceptable (if slightly lazy) to open a show with five minutes of audience-baiting, to get away with it for an hour is mind-boggling.  Actually, it’s difficult not to have grudging respect for a man who can rifle through your wallet while calling you an arsehole to your face.  Some will argue that he knows his audience.  He undoubtedly does.  He just doesn’t appear to like them very much.

You’re from Prestonpans? You’ve got no teeth.  From Aberdeen?  You’re just making up your own dialect.  From Kirkcaldy?  You talk like a Dalek.  Rarely has a show been so parochial, so lacking in any wit and ambition.  A daring, Devil-may-care enquiry as to the presence of any Europeans yields silence.  Maybe they were there, but why on Earth would anyone answer?

There is laughter of course, but it’s not the sustained, shake-the-rafters rumble his reviews would have you believe.  It’s more like localised pockets relating to whichever geographical hotspot he’s currently scolding.  It’s scatter-gun, indiscriminate carpet-bombing.  If he fires enough heavy ordnance some will eventually hit a target.  It’s essentially comedy Syria.

It’s impossible to comprehend Craig Hill’s popularity, especially in the context of the sheer, grinding laziness of his show.  It’s sub-Graham Norton nudge-winkery stripped of all it’s good nature.  It’s hateful 70s club circuit nastiness masquerading as progressiveness and diversity.  In fact, maybe that’s his secret.

Oh, and Craig; please, please, please stop making that playground ‘handicapped’ face to indicate stupidity.  Please.