This review is from the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe.
Kieran Hodgson is the master of high-concept stand-up: his previous Fringe hits have tackled such delightfully esoteric subjects Lance Armstrong, classical music, and the 1975 referendum on Europe.
This year he’s trying something even more audacious: doing a comedy show about Scotland, while also very much being English.
To be fair, ‘Big in Scotland’ is not quite aiming for the same kamikaze impact as Stewart Lee’s infamous routine about ‘the Scotch’. There are some mitigating factors. For starters he looks and dresses a bit like David Tennant these days. More to the point, he now not only lives in Scotland but is indeed, in his own way, big in it.
The show, then, is a (probably somewhat embellished) account of his move to Glasgow after landing a role on the popular Scottish TV series ‘Two Doors Down’. The show is nominally an enthusiastic tribute to his new home. Nonetheless, he is deliciously *aware* of the intense possibilities for annoying his audience.
There are jokes about the Scottish, and their diet of ‘porridge and resentment’, though the harshest zingers tend to conveniently be attributed to his friends.
More insidious is his clear intention of simply being amusingly annoying: the virtuosic opening monologue in which he looks extremely pleased with himself while launching into a long passage of perfectly enunciated Scots Gaelic is probably more calculated to wind the average Scottish audience member up than the insults.
And then there’s the main story, in which Hodgson casts himself in the role of a jaded, inathentic Englishman who screwed up the best man’s speech at his friend’s wedding – filling it with geeky facts and clever wordplay but no actual emotions – and decided to go and seek redemption over the border. The schtick that he was terrible person who needed to change is an excuse for some gloriously near-to-the-knuckle stuff as he regales us with the (possibly exaggerated) story of how he alienated his co-stars by slagging off Glasgow accents and Scottish independence, and only later came to understand them both culturally and literally.
‘Big in Scotland’ is Hodgson writ large: a geeky love letter to his new home, an epic work of self-mockery – there seems to be no doubt that he has been very nerdishly learning Scots Gaelic – but also a very clever exploration of the complicated, somewhat one-sided tension that exists between the English and the Scottish. Some might see it as a bit of a cop-out that he makes it through the show without seriously offending his substantially Scottish audience. But that in itself is a pretty spectacular feat when you’re sailing as close to the bone as this.