Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: Dead!!! (Good Enjoyable Time) evaluate – garish grins | Edinburgh pageant 2025

With his painted face and demonic manner, Joe Kent-Walters’ alter ego Frankie Monroe has been in comparison with the League of Gentlemen’s Papa Lazarou. It’s Lazarus he extra resembles on this follow-up to final 12 months’s debut, which received Kent-Walters a greatest newcomer award. In Live!!!, the monstrous MC of a Rotherham working males’s membership was dragged to hell after the expiry of his pact with Satan. In Dead!!!, he rises once more, after a stint as leisure officer within the underworld, to reclaim his membership from a scarier foe than the satan himself: gentrification.

That’s the premise for a present that doubles down on, moderately than develops, the system that hit paydirt for the Huddersfield man final summer season. And why not? Kent-Walters has devised one thing outrageously humorous and weird right here, a charismatic ghoul of an alter ego, terrorising his viewers with a collection of crap cabaret acts, delivered in a voice as deep and gravelly as a quarry within the bowels of hell. He seems in fewer guises this time, however his tatty ventriloquist’s doll, Mucky Little Pup, returns, and Kent-Walters swaps jackets to star because the usurper of Frankie’s membership, Vegas Dave, too.

More scally than yuppie, Dave – from loathed Lancashire – is however taking the Misty Moon upmarket (“schooner of creme fraiche for you, madam?”) Can our (anti)hero escape the clutches of Beelzebub and save the day? If that’s to occur, we should assist: Kent-Walters embroils his viewers in each set-piece right here, whether or not that’s buying and selling blows with Frankie’s “gammon hammer”, judging his gameshow Wine or Brine?, or singing alongside along with his demented ditties (“I’m on me ’olidays”; “Egg in a bag”) – which of their gleefully aggressive idiocy summon, to comedy followers of my era, Alexei Sayle’s blunt earworm ’Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?

It’s garish, ridiculous and chaotic in all one of the best methods, with our full-throttle host delivering one did-I-just-see-that? picture after one other – none wilder than the skit he performs with a mouthful of greens – and a few selection gags, too, just like the one imagining The Iron Lady as a Marvel film. Happy to report after the success of Kent-Walters Live!!!, dying very a lot turns into him.