Michael McIntyre @ NIA

16th Oct 2009

MICHAEL McIn­tyre has fast become one of Britain’s favourite stand-up comedians, entertaining the masses through the satire of every­day life, appeal­ing to peo­ple from every walk of life and it seems that the 2009 stand-up tour is no excep­tion. Warmly wel­comed by the crowd at the NIA he skipped onto the stage in his sig­na­ture fash­ion (some­thing which he described as ‘magnificent’ in last year’s tour) and began to show up the peo­ple in the front few rows who hadn’t found their seats, get­ting off to a crack­ing start. His new mate­r­ial is ever orig­i­nal and included a comic take on British behav­iour under for­eign sun­shine and the male atti­tudes to nudity in the gym chang­ing rooms, both of which were pre­sented with his skilled tech­nique of mak­ing the obvi­ous and ordi­nary hilar­i­ously funny and caus­ing us to laugh at our­selves almost as much as we laughed at him.

In tai­lor­ing the show for Birm­ing­ham, he delighted in the fre­quently noted fact that Birm­ing­ham has more canals than Venice and derived the con­cept of the ‘Broad Street walk’, pok­ing gen­tle fun at the sec­ond city. How­ever, the days of his inti­mate gigs are over and unless you’re quick enough to book a front row seat you’ll find your­self watch­ing the screens for the major­ity of the evening. Despite a ter­ri­ble impres­sion of the Brummy accent (which he apol­o­gised for in his encore, respectively) he was warmly received and def­i­nitely well worth a watch.