What Do I Do Now... Live

Josh Widdicombe builds his comedy around the principle that minor inconveniences deserve the emotional response of a catastrophe. On stage, his voice rises into an irritated screech as he works through everyday domestic friction, from shower water pooling too close to the edge of the tray to the baffling intrusion of contactless debit cards. When someone asks him to pick up goods on a trip, he treats it as a logistical assault—he is going on holiday, not running errands.

Filmed at the Hammersmith Apollo in London during his 2016 tour, the set caught Widdicombe during a period of heavy British television ubiquity. He had recently debuted his BBC Three sitcom Josh, spent weekly blocks co-hosting Channel 4’s The Last Leg, and taken the trophy on the first series of Taskmaster.

The performance works best when he sticks to specific grievances rather than loose crowd work. A routine about an overnight sleeper train from Edinburgh captures the misery of paying for transport that guarantees zero rest, while recollections of an isolated childhood in rural Devon keep the complaining tethered to something real.