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Inner peace and contentment are not always gifts to the comedian, and – who knows? – maybe that’s why Bridget Christie’s latest show is a teensy bit less thrilling than its predecessors. For Christie has found her happy place: serenely single, professionally triumphant (on the telly too, after years not finding a niche there), and absolved by menopause of the need to give a toss about almost anything. There’s comedy in that freedom from care, and Christie mines it plentifully in an entertaining 90 minutes majoring – like her Channel 4 show The Change – in what life looks like for women (or at least, this woman) when oestrogen gets out of the way.
But Jacket Potato Pizza feels like a placeholder of a show, lacking the fervour or clownish fury of her best work. Its short first half begins by contrasting quotations from Presidents Obama and Trump – but that gives a misleading impression of what’s in store. More indicative is the routine that follows, in which Christie re-enacts a story as told by her menopausal pal, a banal tale of a night out turned into a symphony of digressions, malapropisms (mixing the Benjamins Zephaniah and Netanyahu, most memorably) and vocabulary tantalisingly out of reach. It’s as much sketch as standup, and our host brings it to life with characteristic pop-eyed dismay.
Such is life for the fiftysomething female, as Christie would have it: recording her farts for friends on WhatsApp; reporting to her doctor ever more exotic bodily malfunctions; socially invisible and entirely pleased about it. Two anecdotes early in the show contrast eager-to-please young Christie with her later-in-life counterpart – the one indulging a date’s improbable sexual fetish, the other caring not a jot when her gardener catches her eating cake directly from the bin.
You can’t not enjoy this stuff: Christie’s demob-happiness is infectious, and her flair intact for constructing, routine by routine, mini-carnivals of her own ridiculousness. But there’s a sense too that she’s in her comfort zone with this material – and that one or two routines aren’t quite up to snuff. The number on Alan Carr and The Traitors is too throwaway to justify the clunky segue from ICE killings in Minnesota. A joke about Jimmy Savile and adding new clauses to her will feels a bit arbitrary and unmoored.
There’s peachy material too, like the routine (which she wishes us to understand – honest, guv – doesn’t draw on her own family life) on the thermonuclear obnoxiousness of 15-year-old girls. But I found myself wishing for more of the political edge that animates a later section, in which Christie takes issue with the TV drama Adolescence. The excitement, of an opinion both passionate and provocative, and ventured with her trademark 10-ton sarcasm, is palpable.
While the show concludes with sobering words about the state of the world, the politics are seldom integrated into the comedy here. We’re left with another effervescent show from Christie, if not – as is so often the case with this comic – an essential one.
