Henry Paker: Guilty

You know this story; you’ve heard it a million times before. There’s always a body, murdered. There’s always a dame with lethal looks. The suspects are always omnipresent meditation gurus and symmetrical osteopaths. And there’s always a Gaviscon-swigging children’s illustrator stuck in the middle, forced to draw it all together. 

Actually, no, scratch that. You haven’t heard anything like this before. Henry Paker (BBC Radio 4, Russell Howard’s Good News) dresses up his story like a Humphrey Bogart film, but his voyage into the dark heart of West London is joyously stupid and stupidly joyous. 

Paker has Eddie Izzard’s eye for mixing the surreal with the middle-class mundane (murdered life coaches, binge-drinking pink heartburn medicine) but the great innovation is plot. Rather than an aimless flight of fancy, Paker has grafted his gags onto the rudiments of a murder mystery. It’s less Film Noir than Film Rosé, but gives proceedings a structure that many surreal shows lack.

The actual resolution of who did what to whom is irrelevant (in fact Paker seems to spot some plot holes while on stage) but as a framework it means the strange jokes never get stale. It’s not quite parody—although if you squint there are shades of The Naked Gun and Dirk Gently—but even as things get truly weird, there is still a base level of genre to subvert. 

It shouldn’t work this well, but the result left me delirious. Whatever Paker’s knocking back on stage, it’s something stronger than Gaviscon.