Daniel Kitson: Outside
Scarborough Spa Court, 28 July 2022
Like so much of tonight’s proceedings, Daniel Kitson’s entrance is unassumingly low key, wandering to the slightly raised stage of the Spa Court in Scarborough at bang on 8, tote bag in hand, clad in casual sportswear. Jazz hands, tits and teeth it ain’t, friends. He ambles through the audience with the energy of an itinerant looking for stray fag ends.
It’s a strange setting for a comedy gig, home as it usually is to seaside orchestras and Hammond organ recitals that would make Arnold Rimmer borderline priapic. Indeed, as we¹ found out talking to Daniel afterwards in a quiet moment outside after the show, he knew that the Court wasn’t used in the evenings much and fancied trying out something a bit different, the reasons for which were made more apparent during his set. We park ourselves stage-left, near the front, in deckchairs which, looking at the other more central seating, are by far the most comfortable way to watch proceedings on this slightly-cooler-than-you-might-expect summer evening.
Anyway, once Daniel has put down his bag, and taken off his cap, he picks up the mic and begins. He tells us that this is a fairly special place in his affections partly because, sometime in the early 1990s, he did his first proper public performance in the Spa itself as a 16 year old performer in the National Student Drama Festival, and partly because he’s a Yorkshire lad, so he spent plenty of time in Scarbados as a kid. I think spending time on the Yorkshire Coast is a legal requirement of citizenship of God’s Own Country². There’s a third reason: Rik Mayall. Anyone who’s seen the Rik Mayall Presents …” episode Dancing Queen will remember.
As the show goes on in this slightly unusual space, there are distractions aplenty, both for him and the audience, including a passing seagull who decides to take a walk onstage (probably eyeing the contents of his bag), and passers-by waving at both audience and performer through the windows. Both audience and performer actually wave back.
As you might expect from almost every stand-up you’ll see this year, this show was very much focused on his pandemic experience, and by his own admission, is something of a work in progress (though it is WIP, and he does have a notebook with him, things must be going well enough for him not to need to refer back to it at any point). Unlike most though, in some ways he has rather enjoyed the relative isolation³. He thinks that this is probably easier for him, being single with no children. Pity the poor parents trapped for what must have seemed an eternity. He even says that he managed to have more connection with some friends, albeit virtually, during lockdowns than he did beforehand. For him, with a little income to live off, it wasn’t entirely terrible. He says he was quite lucky there, and other comedians (or venues) maybe weren’t quite so fortunate.
But lots of the interest comes from very personal bits of experience; he refers back to a needle phobia⁴, descriptions of anxiety and panic attacks, and passing references to having done CBT in the past. Mostly the style is like being out on a wander with a mate, chatty and rambingly conversational, but just occasionally there’s a brief, comedically performative explosion of anger to change the pace, like the moment he spies one of the event staff at the doors to the bar that open out onto the Court, with a drink in their hand, watching.
In the end, it is just a show where he talks about doing the thing that all of us have been doing in the last two and a half years⁵, which is working out how to navigate a time the best way you could manage, when no one really had any right answers for how to do it. For him, it meant (possibly too much) baking; bike riding; buying a car he probably couldn’t afford at the time; the daily conversations with his parents; the chats to his friends, and the joy of outdoor tea drinking that gives you an escape route, “Brr. Getting chilly out here.”. And then there were vaccinations and medication (he suffers from asthma). The last part of the set, which is pretty much 110 minutes straight through with no interval.⁶ deals with him going for blood tests after his to second COVID shot, and the dubious delight of trying to do aversion therapy when another student is trying to stick needles in you.
And the very much present tense of that discussion is very important: it’s still not over. The ‘rona is still out there, still dangerous, and there are stil those who are more vulnerable who have to be protected, whatever some of the dim bulbs in Government who supposedly look after our interests may try and tell us. But let’s pass over that for the moment.
The rough edges and the discursive style are very endearing to me. It’s a style of comedy, and sometimes writing, I very much enjoy. Though not everyone was quite an impressed. Overhearing someone on the way out describing hm as “A bit angry and shouty” just made me think , “PAH! Balls to yer!”. Kitson is an extremely talented man. It takes a great deal of work and ability to make all this look off the cuff. I’ve not doubt some of it is, to fit the moment. but a significant amount is very carefully planned to look that casual.
The “Outside” part of all this is very deliberate, and not a little noble. It’s partly about him being back outside in the world again, and performing. But it’s also about us, the audience. It’s about acknowledging there are still many who don’t feel comfortable, or able, to cram themselves into an indoor space to watch someone be funny yet, including him. It’s a nice way for him to be able to perform and for people to engage in a way that works for them. It’s a good idea, not only for him, but for the space in Scarborough, which might also be nice for other stand ups to do their stuff in at the right time. Let’s see if they run with it.
¹ That’s my old schoolmate John, and me. He invited me to this gig with him in the first place.
² With my family, it was Whitby. I liked it so much I stayed.
³ I felt rather more resonance with that than is probably considered acceptable in polite society.
⁴ Thanks to a childhood encounter with a medical student in a Barnsley hospital, he said. I feel his pain a bit here: I’m not good with things like mouth swabs and gagging. Thank you very much for that one, Dr Veitch.
⁵ I know. Two and a half years. When you say it out loud …
⁶ Which meant an acknowledgement of the flurries of movement from people from around two thirds of the way in, working out when the best point to go for a pee was, then having the courage to cut out to do it. He did actually stop one bloke right near the end with the rejoinder ”It’s alright mate, you’ve only got another four minutes left to wait now.”
