Rob Carter

He steps out in a blue windcheater and thick glasses, clutching a sheaf of printed pages, and begins lecturing the room like a village hall tutor. The premise is simple: Christopher Bliss writes three novels a day and considers himself Shropshire’s premier wordsmith. On stage, Rob Carter never steps out of character to apologize for the prose. He reads passages from self-bound novellas, points out why Herman Melville failed by forgetting to thank the reader on page one, and greets hesitant audience reactions with an eager, sunny nod.

Character acts have largely vanished from the circuit, mostly because hauling costumes between weekend clubs is exhausting. Carter made his work at the Edinburgh Fringe and London venues by keeping the machinery light. Even on television panels, he performs the author without adjusting the dial, letting the deadpan delusion sit alongside conventional standup.

What keeps it working is the lack of cruelty. Most deluded characters exist so the crowd can watch them squirm, but Bliss never realizes he is out of his depth. Carter writes awful prose with straight-faced commitment, giving his alter ego descriptions of hotel lobbies and schoolyard bullies that sound just plausible enough to have been drafted in a Shropshire bedroom. The catch is structural: the set relies entirely on the room enjoying a live reading of bad fiction, with no escape hatch if people resist.

Carter started on the circuit playing dry musical comedy before ditching the guitar for the anorak. Swapping clever songs for an illiterate village novelist turned out to be the smarter move.