4 New Poofs and Their Piano

BOBBY CRUSH, we are delighted to announce, is joining the renewed, revitalised and definitely revamped iconic group '4 Poofs And A Piano.'

 

Finding international fame on the Johnathan Ross Show 'The Poofs' have launched back on the scene with Bobby as their guest Artiste.

From the Poof's Press :

' Lastly to join the group, and for a limited time only, is the legendary Bobby Crush whose fingers are so fast and light that he could vajazzle a ferret while playing Rachmaninov without the poor critter noticing a thing! Bobby is looking forward to a career change from cruising the high seas to cruising the Poofs' audience.'

Trolling soon to an old cottage upright near you ...

Room Service ? I'd like to order some comedy please.

Guests will be able to order a ten-minute performance from the Scots comedian, our very own JANEY GODLEY.

"Janey Godley will offer room service comedy to mark the opening of the new Hotel Indigo Edinburgh on York Place and signal its close location to the city’s Stand Comedy Club.

Guests will be able to order a ten-minute show from the five-star Fringe performer along with their food and drink from April 19 to 21.

Janey Godley said: “I’ve done comedy acts in lots of different places but being part of a room service menu is a first for me.

“I love that people at Hotel Indigo Edinburgh can ring up to order their room service and then the next moment, I’ll be in their room telling jokes and doing my act.

“As a local comedian I think it’s great that guests can enjoy a bit of live comedy in the city that is home to the world-famous Fringe festival while they enjoy dinner and sip a glass of wine in the comfort of their own room.”

Dominic Kutschera, general manager of the hotel, said: “Edinburgh plays host to the world’s largest arts festival every summer and as a result Edinburgh has become synonymous with comedy.

“The festival theme is reflected throughout our hotel and we thought it would be fun to take this a step further by putting comedy quite literally on the menu.”"

Godleyness

Following extra dates added to her sell-out tour at the Oran Mor, Janey Godley continues to rake in the rave reviews :

 

Janey Godley: Too Old For Telly
Live Review
Glasgow Oran Mor

Janey Godley maintains that at 51, she’s too old for television and too honest. Her late mother’s life lesson, preceded by ultra-violence towards the headmistress who dared assault the comic as a child, was to call a ‘cunt’ a ‘cunt’. It’s a lesson Godley recalled when she met Tony Blair.

So yes, we’re unlikely to find her on the Comedy Roadshow alongside ‘that floppy-haired fucker’. The Glaswegian’s biography is a bestselling memoir but it’s too spiky for television.

For those unfamiliar with the barbed tales Godley tells of poverty, abuse and meeting the great and good, this evening, April Fool’s, marks the anniversary of her murdered mother’s body being pulled from the River Clyde.

Remarks like, ‘I’ve had a gun held to my head in the Calton’ undoubtedly cement her authority. But more importantly, they legitimise her devil-may-care attitude towards causing offence. She retains an insider-outsider status, able to speak from the experience of a grim upbringing in Glasgow’s East End while unashamedly revealing that her daughter is privately educated.

There’s a funny, fond interplay between the two, with her daughter introducing her in less than flattering terms and Godley responding in kind by spilling all on her child’s sex life.

Godley is a proud Scottish woman who can lazily play to the gallery by suggesting that just four women from the Gorbals would have seen off Hitler, without anything in the way of a routine to support this claim. Yet she places the blame for female body insecurity squarely with women’s magazines rather than men.

Of course she damns domestic violence, but the condemnation emerges organically, even while she plays with the frisson of suggesting that she likes sex ‘rough, angry and fighty’. And that Contrary to society’s prevailing wisdom about mature women, she boasts that she’s currently ‘beating cock off with a stick’.

Despite the subject matter, and some lingering resentment, there’s a light, matter-of-factness to her yarn-spinning , exemplified by her amusing sectarian anecdote of performing to Irish-American republicans in Boston. They presumed she was Catholic, a fiction that she was in no hurry to correct.

At times of nervousness, she blurts out the inappropriate, squeaking out a gag that stops the bar dead. Rather brilliantly, she then turns her pariah branding into an immediate, cheeky riposte.

There are a couple of passages of established material. Like Billy Connolly, Godley long ago reached a point in her career when she can pick and choose from a bottomless well of stories according to whim and where the audience inspire her, making her interactions with them and segues into each routine appear seamless.

An interval after half an hour doesn’t serve her at all and she closed the first part uncertainly with a rushed tale of her mother receiving her comeuppance for mocking the disabled. Undeterred, she returns and resumes on the same theme, more specifically her mammy’s blunt political incorrectness.

This time round it’s a daring, skilfully woven narrative that allows her to have her cake and eat it – condemning the sort of misguided, liberal hand-wringing that allows disabled people carte-blanche to behave anti-socially and without censure, topped with a potent mix of horror and admiration at her mother’s snapping. A tricky balance, the truth of the account and the human behaviour expressed therein release floodgates of laughter tinged with teeth-sucking guilt.

Godley’s mother and her friends, embittered by alcohol and absent menfolk can seem like absolute gorgons. Yet so vividly are they portrayed that there’s a joyous empathy to be had with their foul-mouthed defiance.

If, as with Andrew Lawrence’s Too Ugly For TV tour, a show’s title can be used as passive-aggressive leverage to shame commissioners into offering airtime, then it won’t be before time for Godley. The real obscenity is that in a multi-channel universe, with broadcasters criticised for not employing more older women, a platform can’t be found for such a distinctive, opinionated performer.

Imagine her aping Kevin Bridges with a series tracing the origins of her routines and career, chewing the fat with Jerry Sadowitz and Glaswegian gangsters.'

Sell Out Show

After his sell-out solo show at Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud, 'Live and Unleashed'  were delighted to announce that Lloyd will be, once again, supporting Jim Davidson on 25 of his 35 date UK tour,  Legends. - Look out for a show at a theatre near you !

Neil Fingleton

Neil has just finished shooting a lead role in the samurai action feature 47 Ronin starring Keanu Reeves.  Officially the 'Tallest Man In Britain" Neil turned to performing after a successful basketball career in the US.  Along with many theatre productions, film and TV credits include Shortfellas, Superhumans and X-Men: 1st Class. This year he will be appearing in the Qdos production of Robin Hood at Bradford... playing Little John.