[2012092] Mark Watson – The Information
Mark Watson @ Cinema Nova
7:00pm, Tue 6 Mar 2012
Ever since I first encountered Mark Watson back in 2007, I’ve been a big fan; his quirky humour is brilliantly accentuated by his bumbling presentation, which makes every show a feel uniquely exciting… he has the wonderful ability to make you feel that his performances are barely under control – that anything could happen.
And he’s always felt like a secret little discovery, too – previous shows have had small audiences, despite my inclination to recommend him to pretty much anyone.
Not this year, though. After a quick dash from the late-finishing Dining Uns-table, I was happy to find an aisle seat in a nearly-packed Nova… but it wasn’t until I’d flumped down (and proceeded to start sweating from the dash) that I realised that I was sitting next to a couple wearing the daggiest trackie dacks I’d ever seen. I looked at the surrounding audience – there’s a lot of sullen faces, some of which seemed to have a hint of mean expectation to them – “this better be good,” I could almost hear them saying, and I wondered how they came to be here.
Watson’s bumbling arrival onstage without fanfare perks me up a bit – a warm welcoming applause comes from maybe a third of the crowd. He introduces himself, then apologises for the start; he leaves the stage, does a bit of deep-voiced backstage spruiking, and returns to the spotlight authoritatively to much more applause.
The central premise of the show, he tells us, is about the vast amount of information that is available online, and it’s impact on people’s lives; to demonstrate the impact of The Information, he relays two core threads. The first of which is a wonderfully silly tale in which Watson describes a conversation he had with a taxi driver, during which he insisted that he ran a zoo; it’s a ludicrous foundation for a joke, but it has a glorious callback with a big payoff.
The other main tale is that of Paul Goddard, a mortgage broker that had previously stuffed Watson around. Watson, in a move that surely must be dancing a fine line with Britain’s notorious libel laws, has taken to describing Goddard’s impact on his life in great detail, publicising his deeds (or lack thereof) on every available channel of The Information… and even throwing out a couple of t-shirts with a not-exactly-flattering-to-Mr-Goddard message emblazoned across them.
Of course, if you’ve been lucky enough to hear any of Watson’s BBC radio shows (especially Season 2? of Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better) then a lot of the material in The Information will be familiar to you; but there’s always the little happenstances that can de-rail the show (and even Watson himself). In bragging about his uncanny ability to remember the times tables, Watson was incredulous when someone asked for the value of “two to the power of sixteen”; he then doubled over in laughter when someone in the audience yelled out (correctly) “65,536”, and then proceeded to list all of the first sixteen powers of two. It’s a geek thing, of course, but Watson made it feel like black magic.
Mark Watson is still a wonderful comedian; he hasn’t changed a bit over the years, which I reckon is a good thing. And I was stoked to see that he’s now well-known enough that he had a full house tonight – curiously, though, those trackie dacked people to my left (and the people directly in front of me) didn’t audibly laugh once throughout the whole performance. It was like I was in the middle of a laugh-free zone. Luckily, the rest of the crowd were able to give Watson the feedback he so richly deserves.