Review: John Shuttleworth, Lakeside

All this time some of us have been half thinking that John Shuttleworth is a real person, and along comes Graham Fellows and blows his own cover. Fellows, the actor behind Shuttleworth, held a stand-up question and answer session after the break.

Without the question and answer bit you might have felt a bit short changed: the first half consisted entirely of the film Southern Softies, supposedly made by Chic Ken. In it Shuttleworth visits the Channel Islands to talk to locals and find out whether southerners are softer than northerners. He comes to no firm conclusion.

Shuttleworth in the film is dressed in his trade-mark horrible leather jacket, red polo-neck and old-fashioned, permanently skewed, black horn-rimmed specs. The ironic humour of the character seems even lower key than it was last year, so at one or two points it almost disappears. A high point is when Shuttleworth sings his clapped out songs to a real audience and they express no enthusiasm whatsoever.

Graham Fellows himself is actually quite normal. Like Shuttleworth, he has a tendency to push out his chin and bulge his eyes but not to the abnormal extent that Shuttleworth does. And he doesn't keep sucking his teeth or taking a sharp intake of breath.

An interesting and odd evening.

ALAN GEARY