Peter Kay at The Comedy Store

Before Peter Kay was selling out arenas and crashing ticketing websites, he was a working comic running sets at the London Comedy Store. Filmed in 1999, this club performance captures him right on the precipice of mainstream fame. He had secured an Edinburgh Fringe Perrier nomination the previous year and was just months away from releasing his 2000 breakthrough, Live at the Top of the Tower.

The set serves as a proving ground for the working-class nostalgia that would eventually define his brand. Kay works through early routines about the mechanical frustrations of VCRs and trades minor grievances regarding local taxi drivers. He also acts out a scenario putting himself in the contestant’s seat on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, delivering the kind of conversational, low-stakes material that would soon make him a millionaire himself.