In his latest dyspeptic hour, Garrett Millerick has a routine about nationalising one of the UK’s most popular pastimes. Though a typically contrarian, tongue-in-cheek bit of blue-sky thinking from the lyrically bombastic stand-up, he attributes the relative lack of laughs it elicits to it actually being too good an idea, perhaps not far enough removed from reality.
As someone at his most compelling when he’s in a thunderous grump, biliously ranting at the state of things, capable of kicking off an argument in an empty room, Millerick has a slight issue. The new Labour government is proving a damp squib and common consent suggests that the world is a terrible place right now, so even his most agitated and aggrieved rumblings risk simply encountering nods of empathy and recognition.
For instance, it requires a wonderfully sustained, eight-minute, tour-de-force howl of spleen about the symbiosis he’s developed with his smartphone to elevate this bit above mere relatability, affording it the pathos of an abusive, controlling relationship in which he’s the victim and slavering addict, deploying all of his trained actor’s controlled mastery of building up and then blowing his stack at his own weakness.
So, after recent shows genuinely found him being a bit inspirational and feelgood in spite of himself, recounting overcoming both his and his wife extreme ill-health, Millerick is now ironising the inspirational by harking back to his and humanity’s early dreams of space flight.
With his three-year-old daughter’s dirty protests and recalcitrant attitude suggesting that she too is going to become a comedian, he hopes instead to open her eyes to the wonder of the universe, or at least the glory of the 1960s space race.
You might expect a comic of Millerick’s prickly sagacity and haymaking cynicism to reflect on how space exploration is currently being hijacked by the hubristic egos of billionaires and their priapic compensation. However, he’s much more interested in the Cold War pissing contest of the US and Russia competing to land a man on the moon, a colossal display of international one-upmanship portrayed as daring and scientific endeavour.
Sure, the meme about the Americans spending untold millions developing a ballpoint pen that worked in zero gravity, even as the Soviet Union simply used a pencil might have been a gross oversimplification of history. But, as he points out, who cares? The legend is the important thing, not least as it allows him to be slyly funny about the Russians’ disregard for safety. Similarly, he doesn’t let the complexity of geopolitics impinge. The contest was Us vs Them. And we, the British, have been very much subsumed into the US cause.
Despite being more svelte these days, Millerick retains an outsize presence on stage, always commanding it. And for all his blowhard moments, his writing is intricate, skilfully twisting his often straw man logic into something approaching persuasiveness. He’s at his blistering best confounding the egotistical fallacy that we live in unprecedented times, ramming home the various correspondences between 2024 and 1968, sneering at fragile liberal hand-wringing.
Still, the general tone of Needs More Space is uncertain, with his seemingly genuine enthusiasm for the subject clashing with his instinctive dismissiveness of anything suggesting nobility or heroism. Elsewhere, he’s artful when arguing for sewage in British rivers actually being a good thing but he isn’t prepared to indulge such lunacy as the theory that the moon landings were faked.
Hugely entertaining whenever he builds momentum, these inconsistent viewpoints check that a little, the show unable to blast free from its contradictory impulses.
Tours until 28 February 2025 | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Space race rantings
