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Rachel Parris is known nowadays as a political comedian, thanks to her stints on topical TV shows The Mash Report and Late Night Mash , where she poked fun at public figures in ferocious monologues. Her last live show, All Change Please , embraced this, tearing apart the UK’s pandemic-era prime minister and his hapless Cabinet. “Most of you are here to see me slag off the Tories,” she acknowledged in last night’s show and while, yes, there was plenty of that, Poise is as personal as it’s political.

Parris is turning 40 and that’s prompted reflection. In a return to her musical comedy roots, she made light of this with her opening song, a miscellany of questions from the existential (“What is the point?”) to the everyday (“Is custard liquid?”), all delivered in the ironically perky perma-grinning character that played so well on Mash . She looked back to her mid-thirties, when she publicly rejected the heteronormative idea of success: house, husband, children.



Oops – that’s exactly what she’s ended up with. She balanced a jokey self-satisfaction with moments of self-deprecation; she has a local butcher, sure, but he can’t remember her name. There was a neat joke here about her butcher’s refusal to believe Stacey Solomon isn’t a comedian, and the ongoing lack of female comedians on TV panel shows .

She discussed the cancellation of Mash , first from the BBC, then DAVE (“That one really hurt”), speculating whether it was due to her left-leanin.

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