Jason Manford at the Palladium review: observational wit that is harder than it looks “You’d better be funny,” yelled a heckler at the start of Jason Manford’s Palladium set.
He plays a headmaster in TV drama Waterloo Road, he presents daytime quiz The Answer Run and if he seems relaxed onstage that might partly be due to the fact that he starred here as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz in 2023.
How he came off the sub's bench to replace Usain Bolt in a charity football match and let the side down, befriending a former England international, visiting a Chinese sauna on tour and not knowing how naked to get.
Even when the gags are occasionally low-hanging fruit – such as his smutty Dion Dublin routine – Manford is an absolute master of drawing everyone in.
His subject matter is often trivial – how we secretly love it when an event is cancelled and we can stay in, the ”ballache” of organising nights out, how children are skilled at waffling at bedtime.
