Michael Spicer – The Room Next Door, review: stick to his hilarious videos

Michael Spicer had a good lockdown. His satirical videos have had 60 million views online; last year, they aired on James Corden’s talk show, prompted a spin-off book and were discussed in the House of Commons.

But, as he points out in his first live tour, he’s no overnight success. He’s been making comedy for 20 years – largely to deafening silence, until in 2019 he created “The Room Next Door”, sketches in which he plays a nameless, exasperated spad, coaching politicians through (real-life) car-crash interviews via a secret earpiece.

What makes them so funny isn’t usually Spicer’s dialogue, which often falls back on basic name-calling. (“You massive fart,” he yells at Boris Johnson.) More often it’s his delivery, casual disdain giving way to panic as, say, Matt Hancock or Priti Patel stops parotting his lines and goes off-piste. But mostly the laughs come from the grotesque nonsense already pouring from his targets’ mouths. Take Donald Trump on Elon Musk: “He does good at the rockets.” The funniest Room Next Door skit – on Prince Andrew’s interview with Emily Maitlis – is as good as The Thick of It, largely because “Pizza Express in Woking” is already an unimprovable punchline.

Viral success has put Spicer in an awkward position here. He feels the need to give the fans the hits, but simply playing a bunch of videos, many of which they’ll have already seen online, does not make for an inherently theatrical experience. It’s a conundrum which last month’s Blue Tick festival of lockdown video comedy solved by treating it all as cinema; comedians simply hosted popcorn-munching screenings at an independent picture house.

Spicer aims for something more, not entirely successfully. For large sections of the evening he’s left twiddling his thumbs as we watch a pre-recorded Spicer on a screen, but he does give us several live and semi-live sketches (reacting in person to recorded videos), plus out-of-character ruminations on viral fame that skirt the edge of Ted Talk territory.

The arbitrariness of internet success is his main bugbear; I sympathise, to an extent. His beautifully made short film Paradise Males (with Philomena Cunk star Diane Morgan) – not in this show, but on Youtube – clearly took more work than all his Noise Next Door skits put together, but has been watched by far fewer people.

Spicer seems eager to use this tour as a platform for every bit of his earlier “content” he felt should have gone viral but didn’t – reading out old tweets, playing an only mildly amusing old WH Smiths advert in full – indulgently stretching the evening to the best part of two hours (including interval).

The non-Room bits are a mixed bag, and not always particularly original. A University Challenge skit made me guffaw, but his sketch on a sports commentator reporting on equestrian events without knowing anything about horses was done rather better by Alan Partridge on The Day Today a quarter-century ago.

Spicer is a talented writer, but not yet a particularly confident or charismatic live performer, and this tour is not the best platform for his work. Stick to those videos – or listen to his excellent Radio 4 sitcom on BBC Sounds instead.

Touring until Dec 4: michaelspicer.co.uk