Hitherto apolitical and a perennial contender for the title of most affable person in comedy, no-one, least of all Tiernan Douieb, would have foreseen his Fringe hour becoming quite so spiky with zeitgeist.
Plenty of comics are adapting shows in the wake of the England riots. And he’d already lost his naivety the hard way since turning 30 and becoming part of the doomed Yes to Alternative Voting campaign, not to mention losing his local library and A&E department.
Yet Douieb has suffered the additional misfortune of choosing Norway’s left-wing, youth-orientated society to compare the UK with. Understandably reluctant to rewrite a core component of his show at the last minute, his failure to mention Oslo’s recent massacre is nevertheless conspicuous, undermining an otherwise very human take on burgeoning politicisation with some delightful snapshots of Scandinavian culture and a wonderfully succinct gag about TV historian David Starkey.
His call for mob assault on the Houses of Parliament, however brief and tongue-in-cheek, is something of a misguided ending too, but his enlarged world view ought to broaden his stand-up.