Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your host for tonight, Rich Hall!
Yeah!
Hello. Oh, look at it! I can already see it on your faces.
"Oh, great an American hosting the show.
"Is there no end to what these assholes will try to pull off next?!
"Is he capable? Can he pull it off?"
You're damn right I can!
Welcome to Live At The Apollo.
Comedy is important, ladies and gentlemen. Americans are always,
"Hey, Rich, I hear those Londoners have a dry sense of humour."
Well, they're pretty wet right now, what do you mean dry sense of humour?
What they have is a sense of humour!
You understand? Americans love to laugh.
There's a difference between a sense of humour and the ability to laugh,
that's why I'm in London, ladies and gentlemen.
Where you put up with shit every day of your life. Is there not a day you
don't wake up in London and go what shit is going to befall me today?
What's going to happen that I didn't see coming in a million years?
Oh, look, there's a homeless guy urinating into a spray bottle
and cleaning a wind screen with a head of lettuce.
Well, I didn't see that coming. That's London.
I like doing comedy in Britain, it's that simple, right?
I never thought I'd be standing on the stage
and telling you that our president, our wonderful President, who the world loves,
but Americans are like, "Hey what's going on?"
"Don't know if it's going to happen for him or not."
It turns out the audacity of hope wasn't what we were looking for.
You can't run the whole four years of presidency on the audacity of hope.
Cos hope is a bit desperate, isn't it?
That's not an economic policy, it's just hope.
Hope is right below wishful thinking and just above performing
a rain dance, that's where hope is on the scale of activity.
Hope is what you want the weather to be tomorrow.
So consequently we have what you have
obviously heard of before, ladies and gentlemen, it's the Tea Party.
A bunch of bible bashing, tub-thumping, foot-marching, fundamentalist freaks.
If Satan were to hold a Tupperware party, the Tea Party candidates
would be demonstrating the products, that's what they are.
Last month, in the course of 24 hours, two Tea Party candidates
both announced God had told them to run for president.
God!
Who in 2,000 years has appointed one saviour of mankind,
within one week appointed two different dip wits
to run for President of the United States!
Anyway, Sarah Palin probably gets the most press,
because she's the best marksman.
All the Tea Party candidates like to claim that
they speak for the average Joe in America,
just the normal guy the average, struggling Joe.
First of all, Sarah, you live in Alaska, There's no-one normal in Alaska.
Alaska is full of people running from the Drug Enforcement Agency
and people that hate humans so much, they thought
Montana was too crowded and moved to Alaska to touch moose.
That's who's in Alaska. Oh, we're perfectly... You're not normal!
Sarah Palin says on a TV show, she's being interviewed -
she says, "It is perfectly normal in Alaska to
"open up your front door and see a grizzly bear."
No, it's not!
Oh, it's perfectly normal to look out the front door and see
a 12ft carnivore chowing down on the family dog like the last leg
in a bucket of KFC, nah, see that every day, these are average...
It's not normal to build your house
where the carnivore roam, for crying out loud.
And she was asked, "Well what did you do when you saw a grizzly bear?
"Oh, he was too cute, I couldn't shoot him." Wrong!
If you think that grizzly bears are cute,
wait until you meet terrorists, they'll be adorable.
Don't screw with the bears, that's my message.
Bears want to eat you, even the little ones.
Don't give your child a teddy bear, it's sending them the wrong message.
"Well Yogi and Boo Boo are cute." No!
Have you ever looked at Yogi, you know what he's wearing?
A hat, a tie and a shirt, where did he get that from?
I'll tell you where, a victim, that's where!
He's parading it like a serial killer trophy, reliving every
moment when he ripped them to shreds, it's not right.
So after two years, she decided she doesn't want to be
Governor of Alaska any more. "I'm tired of this."
And she goes off on a whirlwind trip around the world to study foreign policy.
She goes to Israel. As if the Jews haven't suffered enough!
Touches the Wailing Wall and then runs away.
Then she goes to New York, where they're building a mosque
and she looks at it and says that,
"Muslims need to re-fudiate this Mosque."
Even the Muslims are looking at her saying "I don't think that's
"a word in anyone's language - did you just say re-fudiate?"
"Yeah, re-fudiate, refude..." "What do you mean re-fute?"
"No refudiate the Mosque, I said it." It's not a word!
Then she said, "Well, Shakespeare made up words, why can't I?"
"Cos Shakespeare was a Renaissance genius
"and you're a dip-shit from Alaska!
"All right? You can't just make up words."
I read your biography, I want to be refundiated.
So, um, to sum it up, ladies and gentlemen, because people
always ask me, "Rich, is it really better in Britain for comedy?'
and I think it is, yeah, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass,
I'm just telling you it's better. It's a better place, because you do,
you have a sense of humour, that's why you came out tonight.
Oh, he's buttering us up for the kill!
No, I'm serious, cos listen, in America, we don't have
this broken society, you know, we don't have that yet.
That came out completely wrong, didn't it? What ya telling us now?
I'm just quoting something in the newspaper.
Broken society, I don't even know what that means.
Is society broken, fella? Is your society broken?
A little bit. Well, that's not broken that's just damaged, isn't it?
Where you from? Twickenham.
Twickenham. Oh, well no more questions, Your Honour.
You get back to your rugby. What do you do in Twickenham?
I'm a teacher. A teacher?
See this is a man who's not interested in broken society.
He's interested in making children's futures better.
God bless you. That's so much better than what I do.
I just tell jokes, don't I? What do you learn from that?
Nothing! The world is evil, I can't fix it.
I'm not a faith healer, am I?
The thing I've learnt from watching idiots like Gaddafi,
and I say idiot.
The man is a dictator and he only made himself Colonel, what does that tell you?
In America, you can put chicken in a bucket, and you're a colonel!
But what I tell you what I've learnt, fella - what's your name? Peter.
Peter, I have learnt from watching these tyrants that maybe
the term human shield is not being used to its best advantage.
It's usually used in a negative light.
"Oh, he's going to take human shields". I found as a comedian,
quite often when you hit these situations where people have
been here for a while, you're about to hit a wall, they're hot,
tired, a little restless -
that's when the human shield comes in to play.
You understand what I mean, Peter?
I'm going to tell you what I mean. Get over here. Get over here, Peter.
You don't have a choice, Peter.
You are my human shield, friend, march right up here.
There are some people here who want to hurt me.
I'm going to be right behind you the whole time. Turn this way, so I can...
Broader target. Here you go, Peter. Do you have a sweetheart, Peter?
"Yeah, my girlfriend."
Could you say that with a bit more world weariness?
All right, Peter, you take the mike. I just want you to read what I prepared for you.
Say it right and then no-one gets hurt, you understand what I'm saying?
Pretend your girlfriend's not here and you're having to phone home.
Take the mike, watch the technique.
Hello, honey. No, everything's fine,
it's just that I'm going to be a little late getting home.
Why?
Well, I've run into a little situation here at the Apollo.
Rich Hall? Yes, he is a very funny man.
Well, he is currently using me as a human shield.
Isn't that wild?
Who would ever thought... your name... would find myself here on stage?
You should have prepared it a bit better
and then it would have said Peter there already! All right!
I, Peter, find myself on stage here as Rich Hall's hostage,
leading the audience in a rousing sing-a-long.
Who doesn't love the late John Denver sing-a-long, everyone?
♪ Almost heaven
♪ West Virginia
♪ Blue Ridge mountains
♪ Shenandoah River
♪ Life is older
♪ Older than the trees
♪ Younger than the mountains
♪ Blowing like the breeze
♪ Country roads
♪ Take me home
♪ Sing, you bastards... ♪
♪ To the place I belong
♪ West Virginia
♪ Mountain momma
♪ Take me home Country roads. ♪
Goodnight, everybody.
Let's hear it for Peter the hostage, ladies and gentlemen!
Ladies and gentlemen, you're in for a real treat tonight.
We have two, TWO fantastic performers on the show.
Please, ladies and gentlemen, you are about to enjoy
yourself like you've never enjoyed yourselves before.
Please welcome Mr Mark Watson!
Hello.
Yeah. I... Yeeeeah!
It's very generous of you,
but deep down we all know it's impossible to follow Peter.
There are times in your career when you see the person before you
and you think there is nothing I can do here. Singing Country Roads
as movingly and with as little respect for the original as that.
And I'm just backstage, waiting to come on, thinking,
it will be fine, I'll do my best. I'm a comedian, I'm not
the greatest comedian in the world, but by God I will give it a good go.
The only thing I would be worried about
is if I had to follow an avant garde musical genius.
I mean, what can you do?
I'm going to be periodically just drinking water,
very important to hydrate yourself.
I tend to gabble on and you don't allow yourself time to...
The reason that I don't usually have a bottle of water on stage
is cos you get so easily distracted by the unbelievable crap
that they write on these bottles.
If you look at one of these labels, it's unbelievable.
The water you are holding has been naturally filtered
through ancient rock for 5,000 years.
Ancient rock as opposed to these modern rocks that you find these days.
This is a stunning rock formation, yeah, they put it up in the '60s.
Then there's always a little bit about how important water is.
You only find these statistics on bottles of water, conveniently.
Did you know that your body is 80% water?
So it's very important to drink as much water as you can.
As much water as you can. If they had their way
I would be drinking water solidly, basically.
It improves brain function. I think this is probably bollocks, don't you?
Your body is 80% water, you're four fifths water,
I find that a bit suspect really. Four fifths of you is water!
If that's true we're basically paddling pools with eyes.
I find that a bit hard to swallow.
If it's true, if I'm 80% water
why am I buying these expensively branded bottles of water?
Why can't I just suck myself?
Anyway! Erm, I'm sorry.
I didn't really want to see that thought through,
as I was aware it was obviously going in a coarse direction.
Sometimes you start saying something and that's it, it's all over.
A lot of people say, "I could never do that,
"stand-up comedy, that would be my worst nightmare."
You hear this quite a lot if you're a comedian,
"Oh, that'd be my worst nightmare."
In a way, it just shows you how limited people's nightmares must be.
This is just talking.
You must have something worse in the bowels of your subconscious.
I had a nightmare,
I was having the shit kicked out of me by Nelson Mandela.
Proper stuff. Fingers in my eyes, knee in the balls,
surprisingly athletic for an 80-year-old man.
Pulling my hair, all the dirty tricks.
You want to punch him back - you can't, it's Mandela,
you'd be a racist. That's a nightmare.
This is the world we live in,
it's an aggressive, bloody world, isn't it?
I find that I'm a relatively simple person,
I don't want much out of life,
but even the simplest things are hard to accomplish.
For example, I went out recently on a shopping expedition
to buy one carrot.
That was all I wanted, a single carrot, my wife was cooking...
She wasn't just cooking that,
she had a recipe of which that was a component.
She wasn't just going to cook the carrot, "There you are," like an ice lolly.
She was being more ambitious and...
she tends to do most of the cooking.
I'm aware that some people are thinking,
"I doubt he's got a wife." I bloody have!
There's no time to prove it,
but just take my word for it. I have a... I own a woman.
She...
You can't say that these days, can you?
Anyway... to get onto more politically-correct ground,
my wife does all the cooking.
Well, it's actually true. I pretty much let my wife cook,
purely because it's a sensible distribution of skills.
My wife is a good cook, and I'm very poor at it,
and I'm happy with my role
which is basically, you know, foraging.
But I went to buy this one... I say foraging...
Normally, if you go to Tesco, you will lay your hands on a carrot.
There's no real jeopardy there.
Still, I like to pick it up and go, "Got it!"
But, actually, this is my point,
it was surprisingly hard to buy a bloody carrot.
Right, for a start, I took it to the till,
this is all I was buying, one carrot.
First of all, this lady tried to put it in a bag for me,
and I always try to not take a bag if I don't need one,
for environmental reasons.
But they're furious. You'll have tried doing this -
if you say, "I don't need a bag,"
they look at you like, "How dare you?!"
This woman, she said, "What you going to do?"
And I said, "Well, I don't want to appear cocky here,
"but I've got two hands,
"there's only one carrot - I think I will nail this.
"I'm almost certain I'll get this home, by hook or by crook."
Cos what am I going to do - walk around with one carrot in a bag?
"I've got my carrot in a bag."
"How's your day?"
"Yeah, great, just walking with my carrot in its bag.
"I've got a piece of celery at home in a little bit of Tupperware."
I don't want to make out I'm someone with
a repertoire of vegetables that I walk... Anyway...
Then there's a receipt -
she insisted in printing out a bloody receipt,
which meant the till roll had to be changed.
Why do you need a receipt for this transaction?!
All I'm buying is a single carrot - why would you ever need a receipt?!
You're not going to bite into it and think, "Hang on, this is a pear."
Right, it's basically, buying a carrot can't go that badly wrong.
So by now, I'm really impatient, I was frothing with impatience,
I wanted to get home, see my wife, whether she exists or not.
Finally, just when I thought I had finally secured this carrot,
as I was walking out, this girl said, "Excuse me, sorry,
"before you go," so now I have to listen to this. I said, "Yes?"
She said, "Did you want to pre-order the Harry Potter DVD?"
Now, what part of my actions so far would give you that impression?
I was trying to be polite. I said, "Sorry?"
She said... By now, SHE'S impatient, like I'm some sort of idiot.
"Did you want to pre-order the Harry Potter DVD?"
I mean, no, not really, my aim was to buy a carrot,
and I would say I've achieved that modest aim.
I mean, if I wanted to buy a Harry Potter DVD,
what I would probably do is go to somewhere like HMV,
I would go to a place where you can buy DVDs, I would pre-order it,
when the time came, I would collect it,
I'd take it home, I'd watch it.
I wouldn't approach this transaction by going to a supermarket,
seizing a carrot from the fruit and veg bit,
and then standing there at the checkout thinking,
"She knows what I really want here.
"She'll gather my true intentions.
"She knows that this carrot is a metaphor for an orange wand."
Is this what supermarket shopping is meant to be,
some sort of guessing game? "I'd like ten Lucky Strikes, please."
"Shrek 2? I'll just see if we've got it in."
But thanks very much. You've been lovely.
I'm Mark Watson. See you again! Bye! Thank you!
Mark Watson!
Mark Watson, ladies and gentlemen!
Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for one more comedian?
And I mean... absolutely fantastic, one of my favourite performers,
ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome
Andrew... Maxwell!
Heeeeey!
Good evening, the Apollo!
How you feeling - OK?
Yeah.
God, it's hot in this country, isn't it?
It's hot, are you feeling hot?
Ah, it's hot!
God, it's hot.
Compared to Ireland,
it's very, very hot.
Has anybody here ever experienced an Irish summer?
Oh, my God, what an August we can offer the world, people.
20 degrees, every day!
Granted it's not a great tourism slogan.
"Come to Ireland -
"it's room temperature!"
Do we have any English people here?
Welcome, English people.
I want you to know, on behalf of all the Irish people in the room
and all the Irish people watching this at home,
I want you to know you're totally forgiven.
You're forgiven, English people. We no longer hate you.
It's in the past, it's over,
you're forgiven,
we don't hate you any more.
We can't afford to hate you.
Who knew hatred was a luxury item?
Any Muslim people here?
I was just wondering, because this is the thing that I've been getting recently,
when I've been asking, "Is there any Muslims in?"
I'm getting pissed-up geezers saying yes.
I did a gig in Bethnal Green about a year ago.
I went, "Is there any Muslims in?"
This dude stands up, shaved head, fat neck,
Ben Sherman, he was the most unlikely Muslim in the world.
This man looked like he was entirely made of sausage.
He stands up in the middle of the audience.
I went, "Is there any Muslims in?"
He stands up, lifts up his pint of Stella and just went, "Yeeeah!"
"What? You're Muslim?!" He went, "Yeah, why not?!"
Fair enough, but I don't think that's how you join.
I thought, there and then, maybe that is the solution
to all this Islamic panic in the British media!
An all-Cockney mosque!
Now, there's a mosque the Daily Mail would find hard to complain about being built.
Oh, you can see it now, can't you?
The call to prayer from the top of the geezer minaret
in the Cockney mosque.
Who wants some?!
Every Friday evening at the Cockney mosque,
neat rows of white Reebok Classics down the street.
I think, probably the most inspiring thing of the year
has definitely been the Arab Spring.
It's been incredible.
I mean, it's gotten better in some places than others.
The worst thing for me is that Tony Blair's back on TV.
Oh, I really don't like that sun-kissed hustler.
Do you know he's brought out an autobiography?
How bad taste is that?
We're still stuck in the two wars that he started,
so that he could curry favour
with the American industrial military complex,
so he could spend the rest of his sunny life
on golf courses in Florida.
Yeah, there we are, he's brought out an autobiography,
"Tony Blair, My Journey, you know, just in case people want to see it
"from Tony's perspective."
Not really... not really, Tone.
"What other bad-taste bits of merchandise
"have you got up your sleeve there, Tony?
"A fragrance?!"
"Tony Blair, Denial."
You never know what will offend people.
I hope I haven't offended anybody.
You don't know!
You can talk about whatever you want on stage, nobody gives a toss.
If you talk about cats...
don't talk about cats on TV.
You know, even if it's a funny thing about cats.
Like cat in the bin - remember that?
There was a week of cat in the bin!
A week of a cat going into a bin!
You remember the first time you saw that horrific, horrific footage...
of the cat go into the bin.
I know. Live it with me, brothers and sisters.
Is it just me or was your first reaction,
why...
is Susan Boyle...
putting a cat in a bin?!
What the hell is going on?
Genuinely, my first reaction,
when I first saw the cat...
I've turned into such a environmental idiot as I've got older.
Genuinely, my first reaction when I saw the cat go into the bin was,
"Oh, God, no! Wrong bin!"
"A cat is 100% recyclable!"
You never know, man. I love the news and the tabloids.
I love the tabloids, man, but aren't they creepy?
Oh, you better believe they are.
Here's a classic example. The Middletons, Kate and Pippa...
They must have been raised in pretty much the same upbringing, right?
They've got to be pretty similar women?
Not in the tabloids, they're not. I feel sorry for Pippa, do you?
Cos all the filth is on her, isn't it?
Cos the tabloids can't say anything untoward about Kate,
not the future Queen of England.
"Oh, here she comes. Lovely, lovely Kate.
"Oh, lovely, lovely Kate, here she comes,
"Duchess of Cambridge, future Queen of England.
"Here she is. Awwwww...
"Handing out coins to the immigrant children, awwwwww."
"Look at filthy Pippa!
"Oh, you filthy cow!
"Who brings an arse to a wedding?!"
"Awwwww... lovely, lovely Kate,
"awwwww... Healing the poor with her eyes, awwwwww."
"Look at filthy Pippa!
"Down the docks with a bell - ding-ding!
"Come and get it, boys, come on!"
People, you've been an absolute delight.
Thank you, Apollo! Good night!
Andrew Maxwell, ladies and gentlemen!
Andrew Maxwell!
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming out tonight!
We hope you've had a wonderful time.
One more hand, please for Mr Andrew Maxwell and Mark Watson!
Thanks for coming, good night!