Jon Richardson: Don’t Happy, Be Worry

Earlier this year Jon Richardson presented a BBC3 programme about compulsions and weird habits. It was called Different Like Me - which just about sums up the celebration of misery that is this diminutive Yorkshire-born comic's fourth Fringe show.

Like all of us, Richardson has his bad days. It’s just that he’s chosen to focus pretty much unswervingly on them for 60-odd minutes – in front of an audience. The result is an oddly endearing if hardly groundbreaking collection of grumpy anecdotes, non-specific spleen venting and sharply observed gags about everyday life in Swindon, his reluctant home for the past three years.

This is less warts-and-all comedy, more warts and not a lot else. From the off, Richardson has no qualms about letting the sell-out crowd know what he thinks of himself. "I’m what they call a wanker," he explains with barely a minute on the clock.

Inverting Bobby McFerrin’s carefree anthem, Richardson is all about the worry. With the kind of confident delivery you’d expect from a former host on BBC 6 Music, he paints a grimly comic picture of himself as a sort of northern Woody Allen, railing against everything from dancing ("I don’t dance. Ever") to the sartorial choices of the nation’s youth.

While the show’s initial, rather forced chumminess falls by the wayside in the second half hour, Richardson never fully convinces as the odious misanthrope. He’s different all right, just maybe not quite different enough.