| BEN HURLEY’s 'Actually, I DO Mind'. |
| Written by Luke Oram |
| Tuesday, 12 May 2009 14:32 |
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If there’s one sure-fire bulls-eye in the world of comedy, it’s got to be nostalgia. Everybody on this planet is subject to the embarrassing ghosts of their own past. It’s why we love hunting out the old photo albums to scan for lost mullets, or Aunty Faye’s faux-hot pants. It’s also why we instinctively shuffle our copy of Aqua’s 'Barbie Girl' single under the couch as soon as we hear a knock on the door. BEN HURLEY’s show 'ACTUALLY, I DO MIND' cashed in on the nostalgia of a generation, taking the crowd on a veritable tour de force through the 90’s, from the divine to the terrible. The masterstroke is that Hurley did it all through the medium of a 90’s icon in itself; a Power Point slide show. It began where any good retrospective should; the music scene, which had crawled into the 90’s with a terrible hangover from the 80’s, but had picked itself up into an impressive state thanks to the City of Seattle, basically. That being said, Hurley rightfully dragged us back to our collective secret shame. (“top selling albums of the 80’s? 'Thriller' and 'Back In Black'. Top selling album of the nineties? The fucking 'Bodyguard' soundtrack…”) As much as 'AIDM' was a riotous journey through our record collections, it also served as some kind of deranged history lesson, with Hurley playing mad professor, commentator and social theorist, putting his cynical spin on world events and the celebrity world of our previous generation. Of course, the death of Kurt Cobain was easy fare (“no-one saw it coming, he was such a cheery chap”), as well as Michael Jackson’s ultimately unforgettable marriage to Lisa-Marie Presley (“it was like celebrity spin-the-bottle”). It was at the point at which Hurley turned the camera lens back to the homeland, that the show really got stolen. And boy, it got thieved. A few steps into a segue about 90’s kiwi icons, our very own Jordan Luck makes an onscreen appearance that can only be described as typically Luck-ish. That is to say, an entirely unintelligible inebriated warble punctuated by grunts and half-sentences courtesy of an endless stream of the Nectar of the Gods. Luck steals the show, embodying the absolute apex of kiwi nostalgia, transporting the pats right back to Takapuna Tavern sing-alongs and wondering whatever happened to Tracey. It’s perfect. By the time the show reached the fever-pitch hysteria that was 1999’s, Y2K eve, Hurley had managed to take the crowd for a trip down memory lane, cruelly rubbing the faux-pas of our Bata Bullets in our faces one moment... and leaving the stage to the strains of our once-dusty Faith No More records, the next. |
