The Stage

Nicky Wilty - Incident Prone

Published Tuesday 28 August 2007 at 17:45 by William McEvoy

Nick Wilty is a Falklands veteran, and this forms the theme of a thought-provoking stand up show. It begins with images from a war which clearly affected this gruff and genial comic deeply, before moving on to incidents from Wilty’s extensive travels around the globe.

The centrepiece of the show is a gig Wilty performed in the Falklands to mark its 25th anniversary. Instead of an audience of war vets, he had to play to a group of school children bused in for the occasion, leading to some comic changes in his sometimes blue material. Especially funny was the fact that a group of female erotic dancers had not heard about the last minute change.

Wilty’s material is often funny, but is rarely original. He sometimes veers into the politically incorrect, but manages to redeem it with his persona of an old roué who’s been around the block a few times and knows what’s what.

It’s a curiously hybrid show, part stand-up, and part trip down memory lane. An odd concoction, it leaves you admiring the man and hoping he continues his picaresque travels for a long time to come.