Evening Standard (London): The war - and my life as a milkman

COMEDY Mark Steel Bloomsbury Theatre

TIMING is everything in comedy and in all senses Mark Steel's timing could not currently be better. He has been a political animal for more than 20 years, but war has given him something to get his teeth into. Not since the heady days of Thatcherbaiting has he been so livid.

His Bloomsbury gigs this weekend revealed a razorsharp satirical bite that has rarely been conveyed on his radio shows or in his broadsheet columns.

The tone was set by his entrance music. One might have expected the Internationale, but one got Joey Ramone singing What a Wonderful World, exemplifying Steel's blend of fury and punky Utopianism. His agenda is a mixture of astute observations on the war and self- mocking anecdotes about his own life as a hardline socialist, which started when he was a milkman and living with his mum.

He is equally good at conveying the excitability of recent reportage and growing up in dull Seventies Swanley.

Someone from another London satellite saying they know what Swanley is like is akin to saying to Nelson Mandela: "Yeah, I've had hassle from the Old Bill myself, I know how you feel mate." Steel is not the most charismatic stand-up. He must have worked hard to nurture his Eighties schoolteacher image of bad haircut and worse clothes.

But there is an ease to his delivery that lends his performance an unlikely grace. His strength as a political comic is his very ordinariness. He does not have the cuddly righteousness of Jeremy Hardy or the factual rigour of Mark Thomas. He simply speaks as he sees it.

Blair and Bush are a cross between dangerous lunatics and deranged housewives; trains in this country are going to the dogs, tormenting us with a Russian Roulette tease of being periodically punctual, when consistently late would actually be kinder.

He nails absurdities everywhere with savage nononsense putdowns.

Occasionally the pace flags, but if Steel fumed for two hours he would probably explode. A full-length show as solid as this is a rarity in these days of cut-and-run Edinburgh quickies.

Dissenting voices do not come much funnier.