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Bob’s Blundabus
August 24th (one-off show)

Material:   Delivery:   Laughs:   

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Bob’s Blundabus is a rickety wee venue, but before every show there’s always a hub-hub bubbling up in bohemian defiance of the conventional Fringe. Chatting to a comedienne in the queue called Rosie, I asked why she was coming to this one-off, late night show by fiery young upstart, Sam Nicoresti. Her reply was that she had seen a version of it down Leicester & thought Sam had smashed it. Maybe it was gonna be worth staying up note-taking until 01.30 AM, after all…

Sam’s 80 minute show sees us all essentially invited to his sleepover; a royally ridiculous, dangerously deranged, cleverly victuallated masterwork-in-progress. Our curly-hair’d boy wonder commences proceedings by bursting from the womb of a tri-breasted Holy Madonna puppet, Monty Python style, with the audience-strings forming fallopian tubes for the ‘Ceremony of the Egg.’

From this showbizzy opening it all gets wilder & weirder & more & more bizarre. Along the way I loved the naturality of a football-terrace audience delightedly bursting out into spontaneous drunk-o-clock chants. ‘Dad-dy! Dad-dy! Dad-dy!‘ we all cry as Sam’s disfigured Bahometean father turns up to the sounds of the Stygian swamp, wondering what the bloody hell all these people were doing in his house! Into the mix, & up to the sleepover, came an assortment of Sam’s pals; a sumptuous banquet of floorspots for folk like Dr Jellywoz, Jimmy Slim (AKA Mr Vesuvius), & Sam’s old school bully, Andy, who ends up in a duel with our host funnier than the one at the end of Blackadder III.

Then we reached the hour-mark. It was 01.10 AM, my mind had just started to wander to the thirty mile drive home & doing the maths on the alcohol-consumed thro a day’s reviewing, time spent for it to pass out of my system & whether I was safe to drive. It was only natural, 50-60 minute shows are the proven, boredom defying norm & we’d just broken thro’ the threshold. But Sam is no kowtowwer to convention, & he was ready to give us twenty minutes more. ‘Am I gonna enjoy this,’ I asked myself, ‘well Mr Nicoresti, over to you…’

I needn’t have worried, for at that very moment he pipes up, ‘we have come to a very important part of the show – lets play pass the orange.’ And so we did, starting another time-blurring rush of fun, sketches, chanting & – most importantly of all – lots & lots of laughs. Seeing Sam’s sleepover loftily upstairs at the Blundabus felt morphingly like being on a shortish flight, with the characters coming on stage as if they were air hostesses bringing different stuff like food, drinks, magazines, gifts… you get the idea. All praise to the pilot, then, who is pulling off something so undeniably phantastic, & so thoroughly enjoyable, that a new Knowing Me, Knowing You could be on our hands.

Damo