Michael Legge: Tell It Like It Is, Steve

The Fringe is a great place for comedy in-jokes. Trusting the industry-savvy crowd to go with them, comics like Michael Legge can reference such luminaries as Tony Law, Bridget Christie and Josie Long and still keep most of their punters nodding and chuckling along. Legge skewers the modi operandi of all of the above and more in this enjoyably ranty set. It’s one of a few shows this year to take the presumed formula of an “award-winning show” and then subvert and parody it. It appears to offer us a redemptive narrative arc, then throws it gleefully back in our faces.

Legge is proudly idiosyncratic in his references more generally. The thread running through the show is his frustrated fandom of cult singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, who once told him to “fuck off”. The show title is something that Legge once shouted at the lead singer of '80s rock band Marillion at a gig. But audience members who know nothing about these musicians still find plenty to laugh at here (I know because I’m one of them), testament to the shouty, sweary sincerity of Legge’s storytelling.

The overall effect is like walking into a sort of private member’s club for 40-something fans of comedy and '80s cult music, but finding the company so much fun that you end up staying for several pints. You feel a little sorry for the foreign tourists and much younger punters who have turned up and look a little lost. But for the rest of us, this is a bracingly rude, very witty and surprisingly inclusive show, whether or not it bags that elusive award.