Doncaster, we have a problem: there is an effluent in the room. Sorry, an elephant. When Patrick Moore popped his clogs and joined the man on the moon in the sky at night, the gig of presenting all things extraterrestrial should not have gone to an “idiot George Formby” aka the apple-growing musician-turned-astronomer Brian “The Colon” Cox. Nay, nay and twice nay!

The “eagle-eared” among you would have spotted that one man, and one man alone, fitted the clogs. The doyen of light entertainment and of making heavy weather of all creatures great and small, Count Arthur Strong. After all, since accidentally breaking his Gregory Peck’s courtesy of a downward thrust of his Anusol-anointed posterior, he now sports a pair of Moore-esque monocles. One for rehearsal, one for the recording and one for a post-show glass of “see-through milk product” in The Shoulder of Mutton.

But it was not to be, for the “Director Colonel of the BBBC” gave the job to Colon.com. However, not one to let sleeping dogs lie – or for that matter cats: he once sent a pussy in the post to the pet-loving Blue Peter so that it could lick itself clean next to Valerie Singleton –  Arthur argues his corner in his trademark circuitous manner. And over the course of two side (and at times front) splitting acts, uses his “personal breath” to do a Jim Bowen by showing the Beeb what they could have won.

To say more would be, as a gas engineer might put it, a spit of a boiler. Malaprops there are aplenty; how he can generate waves of laughter out of the repeated murdering of an innocuous phrase such as “just a couple of puffs” is pure genius. Songs there are but two, but they are so gut-busting to perform and bear witness to that A&EIEIO are on speed dial. And though Nina might have had 99 red balloons, Arthur has an assortment of 92 fewer than “an hundred” which he uses to “educate, entertain and deform” the truth about the solar system. The highlight being a word association list which grows more arms and legs than a prosthetic limb convention.

David Copperfield started at the beginning, but Arthur being Arthur, his follow-up tour to the equally funny The Sound of Mucus starts at the end. Leaving him, literally, with nowhere to go. And it is his incredible and enduring ability to dig himself into a hole, and keep digging, while all the while plumbing the depths of comedy gold, that makes him in the words of “David Essex from Mutiny On The Buses” a star man!

Peter Callaghan
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