It’s lovely to be here in Colchester, says Rosie Holt, “where people still voted Tory on Thursday”. For most comics, that wouldn’t be a boon. But it gives Holt something to work with. She’s here, to begin with, in the blue-blazered, Conservative MP character from her hit online videos, a cannon-fodder backbencher contorting herself to hold the party line. The videos, in which Holt MP lies so hard she confuses even herself, are great – but her debut live show, at Edinburgh festival fringe two summers ago, did not represent a wholly successful transition to the stage.
This one, called That’s Politainment, is better: Holt feels more comfortable in her own, and her characters’, skins. It’s a fairly conventional set, with contributions from her MP alter ego, her rightwing GB News host Harriet Langley-Swindon, and from Holt herself. Neither of the fictional characters has yet evolved beyond the two-dimensional, and – if you’re looking for variety – it’s not ideal that they both send up the same ideological impulses. But there are some droll jokes here, such as when her MP blames Toby Jones for the Post Office scandal, or her semantic gymnastics (“we’ve changed the definition of ‘definition’”) inspired by the government’s decree that Rwanda is a perfectly safe country.
What I craved was something a bit wilder or more unexpected, to complicate the clever but familiar satire of these soft targets. And there are flashes of that, like Langley-Swindon’s flight of fanaticism when trying to define “woke”, a vision of perplexed pronouns, oat lattes and fountains frothing with men’s tears. The closing section of the show, hosted by Holt herself, is a bit of a grab bag, with a pair of sketches (one spoofing Russell Brand; one imagining Liz Truss’s inner monologue) revived from that 2022 show, and a pleasing running gag about the hen’s teeth nature of Labour policies, to offset accusations of political partisanship.
Partisan she may be, but – as she wonders at the end of That’s Politainment – can Holt’s comedy career survive the advent of a Labour government? On this evidence, you’d fancy her chances.