John Bishop
Live – The Sunshine Tour DVD

At times John Bishop’s kids must really hate living with him. Not only do they have to live with a man who tries to convince them that the dance moves from Saturday Night Fever are still cool, he then spends ninety minutes each night recalling these stories to audiences of up to twenty thousand people. Now, bearing in mind this DVD was recorded at the end of a fifteen night run at the Echo Arena in his home city of Liverpool, that’s an awful lot of people who now know why his kids think their dad is “a knob” and why he think his kids are “gay”.

With ninety percent of the material in his set (or ‘hate rant’ as Bishop describes it) pulled together from John’s family life and his experiences over the last twelve months, it comes as no shock to find he is a hit with most generations although you do feel his embarrassment when he recalls seeing someone buying his DVD only to be told “it’s not for me, I think he’s shit”. You see, the thing about the Scouse comedian is that, regardless of whether he is on the telly or playing in front of twenty thousand locals, he does come across as the ordinary family guy who prefers to eat at the Toby Carvery rather than the Hilton. His routines are based around day to day occurances that we all go through – buying kids Christmas presents, teenage sleepovers and surviving life as a man who has hit forty and is slow losing the connection with what is cool these days. It’s all delivered with the honesty of a man who can’t quite believe that he got the opportunity to stand next to his fantasy shag, Cheryl Cole and hang out on Top Gear but then had to go home and face the disappointed faces of his kids after telling them he didn’t crash. Still, for all the awkwardness of the situations Bishop finds himself in, his stories really are heart-warming and you know thousands of forty-something Dads are sat with their teenage kids thinking ‘thank fuck it isn’t just me’.

John Bishop admits he had been at the stand-up game for quite a while before hitting the big time and still can’t quite believe that a man with the teeth of a horse is playing to audiences of this size. The thing is that, if anyone deserves this success John Bishop does and, as he runs through his final routine, you find yourself watching a man who is finally living the dream and, unlike his kids, loving every precious minute of it.

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Review by Graham Finney