Michael Barrymore

Michael Barrymore has abandoned comeback stage show only three nights into a seven-week run.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
It was emotional, but the emotions were very disturbing. At one point, where he is interacting with the audience, which is the better part of the show because the scripted stuff was really dire, a man stood up and took the mike and said, "On behalf of the audience, Michael, I want to say I have been in the gutter too and climbed out, and we all know how this feels." You cannot maintain the polite fiction that you are out for an evening of light entertainment. You realise you were watching a desperate man. The show was quite exciting and funny and entertaining, but it felt really scary and dangerous. I don't think he is the kind of performer like a Lenny Bruce who can handle this. He is basically a music hall man and he was wise to pull out.

DEBORAH BULL:
I sat through it with sweating palms and a knot in my stomach. I went hoping to see him bounce back. He has never been "My kind of guy" but I could see he was a good entertainer, good at what he did. I went, as half the audience did, not to see him fail. We kind of wanted to see him do it. There were of course the Essex girls, who love him anyway. Gradually the curtain went up and there was this set. I thought, "This looks like a cruise ship." On came Suzanne Prentice who sang like a cruise ship singer.

MARK LAWSON:
A New Zealand crooner.

DEBORAH BULL:
A New Zealand crooner! I realised that wasn't irony but was going to be the show. It never rose above that level. But one saw that this was a broken man. It was professional suicide going out there. The audience was not with him. There was a point when he said to the band, "Look, you start. I will come in. It doesn't matter if we don't finish together because frankly no-one here cares." And it was true. Nobody actually did. People were leaving in droves, and by the end it was such a relief when the curtain came down.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
The Wednesday night he had a positive audience, he had a standing ovation and the audience loved him. So he quit after that show, not after the terrible press previews.

MARK LAWSON:
It so happens we saw the three nights between us and it turns out that most of the sketches in the first two nights had gone completely by the third night. The problem was he hadn't worked out what the act was before he went in.

PAUL MORLEY:
No. One of the metaphors for his isolation and loneliness was there didn't seem to be any advice. You would have thought he would have had great script writers that isolated and immunised him from the coldness of the audience. We went to the press night. It was doubly cold because of that. We talk about professional suicide, I was in the third row, which was frightening for two reasons - One, its very close to him pulling you onstage, and Two, you can see the fear in his eyes as you realise he is not getting the energy from the audience that he needs. Sometimes I felt I was on a cruise ship to Gilligan's Island, and other times I felt like I was on a cruise ship to a penal colony, and indeed a penis colony, because one of the weirdest things about it was that he had a reliance on the dick joke. He hasn't sorted out who he is. I lamented the lack of advice he was getting.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
In addition to the fear, I thought what was most genuine about him was the hostility that I think accompanies the true comedian. I thought there was enormous hostility, not only towards the press, which he expressed on the third night, but towards the audience. That's why those jokes have that kind of edge.

PAUL MORLEY:
That's one of the weird things about the show, which could have run for years until he got his confidence back because it was electric. But it was a sort of Letterman, he has that weird ability to be spontaneous and insult people. There is a role he can play. Unfortunately, it's mixed up in the curdle that he used to be a light entertainer. His audience now come in the form of stalkers. They are stalking him.