One man performing to twelve thousand people a night for nineteen dates. Let that sink in for a minute. That’s over 225,000 people through the doors at one venue alone. To say that Scottish comic Kevin Bridges is a big deal is something of an understatement and this DVD recorded on one of those nights shows exactly why.
Kevin Bridges grew up a working-class lad in Clydebank, a place he is “reasonably” pleasant about and, despite now mixing with the kind of people where a gazebo in the garden doesn’t necessarily equate to a murder scene, Bridges’ humour is still rooted firmly in his working-class upbringing and is precisely why he is pulling in fans by the thousands. From failing miserably to get off with girls at school discos to being fat-shamed at school to the Friday night frustrations of ordering Chinese takeaways, they’re all the kind of memories most of us share with Bridges however, when the Scot recalls a conversation where he nervously tried to ask the builder fitting his new kitchen out for a pint, you realise just quite how brilliant a storyteller he is.
Even when he sidesteps away from his own upbringing to explore how Joseph’s news of the immaculate conception would have been greeted had it been told instead on a Glaswegian building site, the whole routine demonstrates the kind of working-class bullish honesty that most of us from that background will have experienced at one time or another.
During one routine where Bridges explains how he tailored his routine before performing at an event where he was “supported by Barack Obama”, you realise those working-class days are long gone for Bridges. Thankfully, the characters he portrays in his routines are as familiar as they are comical given that most of us have been or have at least experienced one or more of those characters at some point during our lives whether we like to admit it or not.
While his millionaire status rears its head when the sharp-suited Bridges admits it was easier for him to lose weight once he could afford to buy nice food, as you watch an entire arena wiping tears of laughter from their eyes, it doesn’t detract from the fact that the Scot is and always will be that working-class lad from a rough estate in Clydebank.
