Colin Hoult

Colin Hoult approaches the microphone like someone who arrived with an urgent, scripted announcement and immediately lost the plot. He will state a starting premise, like a childhood Christmas in Nottingham, and within thirty seconds abandon it for an argument with someone in the second row who reminds him of a distant uncle. His voice climbs into camp squeals and dives into flat Midland grunts. Just when the room thinks he has surrendered completely to distraction, he snaps back into the original sentence with a grin, having built three distinct character act-outs inside the detour.

For years on the British circuit, audiences encountered that energy almost exclusively through masks, most famously his theatrical alter ego Anna Mann. Retiring the character to tour under his own name made clear that the flamboyant distraction was never just a costume. The silliness is native to him.

His sets work best when he treats his family like a sketch troupe. He brings his blunt father to life through guttural sighs and captures his mother with grim, apocalyptic catchphrases, turning domestic history into farce without sounding mean. The friction in the format is structural; he can wander so far into an improvised detour that the narrative frame starts to buckle.

That scattershot pace reflects a Nottingham childhood spent in the shadow of Mapperley mental hospital, alongside an ADHD diagnosis that arrived much later. Where other acts turn neurodivergence into a lecture, he simply plays it out in real time as an erratic, warm pantomime.