The Goldsbury blend

You can’t perform, the owners wanted you arrested after your last gig,” says the normally genial Tony Ferns. “You talked about STD clinic’s for Christ’s sake…”

Calm down, I’m merely here to check out the James Goldsbury’s one-man-show Ich Bin Produkt, which he’s staging again on July 16 at the Ha’Penny Inn’s Battle of The Axe. Goldsbury, a winner of RTE’s New Comedy Award in 2000, first took to the stage in this very club in 1998 and is shortly to take this new show to Edinburgh for a month-long run. It’s a risk and Goldsbury knows it. But, like many working comedians at his level, he’s reached a plateau on his home turf, having played most of Ireland’s comedy clubs, and it’s time to climb another mountain.

“Of course I’m nervous,” he confesses, “but then I usually am. Comedy isn’t the kind of business where you get handed success on a plate. It’s not Findus. And to be honest, while I thought that winning the RTE award might have opened up a few doors, that didn’t prove to be the case. The infrastructure at RTE might be a little better now, but it wasn’t a couple of years ago. Taking risks is part and parcel of the process and, if I were to be quite honest, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think I was able for it. It’s a one-man show in every respect, I wrote it, I perform it and I’m publicising it, for the simple reason that no one else is going to do it for me. And if it works, and I believe it will, great, and in the event that it doesn’t I’ll have learned how to do it better next time.”

We’re talking quietly while regular Ha’Penny Inn performers are warming up the crowd. Comedian and keyboard whiz Donal Norton has left tonight’s MC duties to Jeff Keough and airs some new material. Singer/songwriter Hayley Reid gives us a brace of original numbers that show off her voice to good effect and if she’s lyrically less than adventurous then that facility may well come with time. Cork comedian Paul Crowley trades in a gentle self-deprecatory humour and impresses, while first-timer Micheal Geraghty scores with two original numbers and a re-worked version of The Beatles’ White Album classic “Blackbird’. Normally seen fronting Dublin rock outfit The Beans, he finishes his set to rapturous applause and from his beaming smile it’s clear that the club may well have discovered another regular.

After the intermission, James takes to the small stage displaying none of the nerves he spoke of earlier. After asking the audience to simulate the absolute indifference he says he’s expecting in Edinburgh, (they don’t, of course) he’s off. More mainstream than many of his contemporaries and drawing on television and in particular his hatred of TV adverts, his material is fluid and fast paced.

Using characters and an array of voices, he calls to mind such entertainers as Harry Enfield or John Sessions, acting out short skits in which he jumps from persona to persona. In one unexpectedly hysterical moment he answers a heckling German tourist in fluent Deutsch. The newer material mixes seamlessly into the old, the favourite text messaging gags – “I cnt cm 2 d pub b cs I m n FIRE! - segueing gently into newer stuff about relationships and his frankly surreal fascination with Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs. Sticking loosely to a script he also engages in flights of ad-libbed fancy that stretch the show to an hour and 15 minutes.

It’s not flawless. His take on a gay character goes down well with the mainstream crowd but in the politically correct arena that is Edinburgh he may find that he needs to treat his subject with a little more understanding. After all, Brian Dowling, Graham Norton and Anna Nolan, have all proved that Irish television queers are big business in the UK, and a lisp and a limp wrist just aren’t enough.

“I disagree with you,” says James after the show. “The gay character I do is in no way meant to be representative of every gay guy, that’s fucking stupid, but those guys do exist. And to be honest I don’t think I should tailor what I do for fear of offending some liberal. It’s comedy for god’s sake, you exaggerate for effect and that’s what makes it funny, to take something normal and mundane and blow it up into something ridiculous. Extremes are funny.”

Much of the newer material centres around Goldsbury’s professed hatred of advertising but is he really so anti-advert?

“Yeah, I really am,” he asserts. “It’s just that people who make ads seem to think that we’re all fucking stupid. And they constantly feel the need to sell us the same old stuff in new ways. How can anyone say anything that hasn’t already been said about, say, shampoo? You can’t, but that doesn’t stop these suited bastards from doing it anyway and eventually it becomes lies. They’re lying

to us every night on television and yeah, that makes me fucking angry. Do they think we don’t know?

“Take washing powder for example, when I was a kid you had washing powder, it washed clothes clean, couldn’t really wash them any other way I suppose, but that wasn’t enough. They introduced ‘biological’ washing powder, a phrase incidentally that means fuck all in reality, and this was a revolution in laundry science. The ads showed little pac-man organisms eating the dirt. What’s that about? And now they’re marketing ‘non-bio’ powders that are the new big thing but we had them before and these guys said it was crap. Do they think we’ve no memory? We’re not fucking goldfish. So, uh, yeah, I don’t like advertising. You never see an ad for real stuff, like plates. That’s the kind of ads I want to see. Or a real toilet paper ad, it’s like ‘It’s soft and gentle and moist and perfumed and you can wrap up a puppy in it and…It’s for wiping your arse for fuck’s sake! We know this, we won’t be shocked!”

Some of Goldsbury’s own spoof adverts display a certain flair for writing ad copy, so what if an executive from J Walter Thomas attends the Edinburgh show and offers him a gig at 60 grand a year? Would he take it?

“Of course I fucking would,” he grins, “wouldn’t you? Just so long as I could still do the shows at night!”