Stephen K Amos: The Feelgood Factor

“The BBC have finally given me my own TV show!” Stephen K Amos announces to a cheering crowd. “And no, Lenny Henry hasn’t died!” After sitting through this hour of wilfully bland, one-size-fits-all comedy, you rather wish the BBC would stick with Henry instead. The older man has been a cuddly, unthreatening and—dare I say it—frequently boring presence on our screens throughout his long media career. But next to Amos’ decaffeinated brand of ‘feelgood’ stand-up, Henry starts to look almost subversive.

Watching this show is like being pummelled into submission by a rainbow coloured stick marked ‘HAPPY’. Glitter balls are set into the stage and upbeat pop classics like Boogie Wonderland and The Bird is the Word pump out of the soundsystem as the capacity 800-person audience shuffles in. The first five minutes of the set are taken up, not with jokes, but with repeated assertions that we “will have a good time.”

“There’s nothing heavy, nothing deep” in this set, Amos assures us, and he’s not joking. It’s basically a whistle-stop tour of all the most overused stand-up subject matter, from childhood nostalgia (“anyone remember Formica?”), to observations on the “British stiff upper lip,” to uniting the audience in ritual mocking of the local lower-class ghetto. Incidentally, the latter point somewhat contradicts Amos’ claim to universality – his caricature of people from Leith is particularly nasty, as well as being crushingly unimaginative.

Amos is not an unskilful comic. On the contrary, his aptitude for audience interaction is almost hypnotic, like watching an experienced magician smoothly perform an old trick. His comic mind is similarly well-honed, and despite obvious efforts to make the set as idiot-friendly as possible, he sometimes comes out with something genuinely funny and original.

But by the time we get to the musical finale, in which Amos invites a planted audience member on stage and gets her to sing What A Feeling against a backdrop of dry ice and dancing girls, the light-entertainment cringe factor is just too much to bear. If your familiarity with comedy extends beyond the odd Peter Kay DVD, or if any part of your soul is rebellious enough that you dislike being told how to feel, then you will leave this gig with more of a frown than a smile.