Review: Peter Buckley Hill: This Show is Not Sh*te, It’s Shite, The Canons’ Gait

Peter Buckley Hill did what everyone with a show title that fell victim to the Fringe Society’s ludicrous bowdlerisation of their copy should have done. He pulled his show from the brochure and demanded his money back. And, eventually, he got it. ****

PBH has some excellent advice for the Bowdler Boys regarding next year’s brochure. But you should hear it from him. Now entitled This Show is Not Sh*te, It’s Shite, PBH’s annual wander along the wilder and woollier shores of comedy is as much of a strange delight as ever.

Stewart Lee might have started the obsession, that has infected so many comics, with deconstructing their own performance. (FYI, you generally have to have a performance worth deconstructing before that works) but now PBH takes deconstructionism to new heights as he picks over the corpse of his 1994 show, which still bears the stab marks of five one-star reviews, to see where it all went so horribly wrong.

Just in case the “old shite” is too bad, Peter has thoughtfully brought along some “new shite” and allows us to judge which is best. “Error Number One,” beams Peter, and off we go.

One terrible waistcoat, a badly-timed political song, a torrent of outrageous 
puns and Peter’s legendary, 
17-part Birdsong Set and we are all falling about the place laughing. Then he pulls out the scoreboard and heads off into the material he managed to squeeze out of the period of writer’s block that stopped him writing a whole new hour for this Fringe.

Luckily he kept a sort of diary of Bits from the Blockage and it is glorious to discover how many laughs Buckley Hill can garner simply from his one line “notes to self”.

We get geographical construct humour, more from Guardian Soulmates and Shaw’s Academical Dress.

This is another glorious hour from the founder of the Free Fringe.

Until 26 August. Today 6:05pm.