Romesh Ranganathan @ The Garage, Glasgow, 13 Mar
Romesh Ranganathan brings his Irrational tour to the Garage stage and wins over a tough crowd.
Romesh Ranganathan faces resistance early at this Garage gig. Chatting casually and warming up the audience, his opening questions often face one-word answers – or a silence that may seem unexpected for a comedy festival, but is also fairly usual for a Glasgow crowd making its expectations clear.
Irrational was cancelled at the Fringe due to the filming of his hit BBC show Asian Provocateur (which has recently been recommissioned for a second series). While the TV series takes place in Sri Lanka, over 5,000 miles from his native Crawley, Irrational finds Ranganathan meandering and digressing on material closer to home: kids, marriage, family, race and the odd Starbucks-based crisis.
The wandering nature of the show means the ending, when it comes, is sudden and falls a little flat. However, with Ranganathan as our guide, Irrational as a whole never feels directionless and he memorably returns us to an opening part of our journey via a callback. With his downbeat humour and attitude Ranganathan consistently elicits the kind of loud laughter that makes us forget this audience was ever hard to please.
A full list of Romesh Ranganathan's Irrational tour dates for 2016 can be found at romeshranganathan.co.uk