The world's longest running live comedy from the Canal Cafe in London once again visits Edinburgh with highlights from its regular shows over the past year. This year it has moved to a different performance space, from the proscenium stage in the basement at Chambers Street to a thrust configuration on the top floor, which does give it a more intimate feel.
If anyone hasn't seen this group before, it covers the same satirical ground as shows like Have I Got News For You on BBC television and The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4, but in the form of sketches and songs, the latter taking the form of new lyrics about current events set to existing songs in a wide variety of musical styles. However Newsrevue takes its humour far beyond anything that would be allowed on the public airwaves.
At its best, the writing in Newsrevue is superb, biting, revealing and hilarious; at its worst, it is cruel without being funny or offensive, bordering on school playground humour. This year's show contains a lot about Blair, Prescott, Blunkett and Brown, plus the 'war on terror' and suicide bombers, but surprisingly little about Bush. Perhaps they think that every joke about Bush has already been done, or the man himself is funnier than anything they could invent. Sometimes the jokes are taken past where they are most effective, as though a 'quicky' has been stretched into a sketch with the laughs diminishing as the sketch goes on, but most pieces hit their mark and produce a lot of laughs from at least part of the audience.
We are treated to hoodies selling titles as well as drugs, a wonderful version of I Want To Break Free about wanting to leave the mobile network 3 because of not being able to get a signal anywhere, Prescott singing a Blur song about his house in the country (with the wonderful line 'I got morning glory 'cos I live like a Tory'), a version of Trinny and Susannah (trying to help out Ruth Kelly) who are even more smug and self-obsessed than the real thing, a Marks and Spencer-style advert for David Cameron, a merciless attack on TV adverts and anyone who falls for their claims and a TV 'phone-in to decide which child is allowed to survive when a school building collapses. The whole show is wrapped up as 'tragedy entertains you' in a dig at the content of a lot of modern TV shows, to the tune of a song made famous by Robbie Williams.
On the other hand there are gags about disabled people, Moslems, Blunkett's blindness, homosexuality in the Lib Dems and Mrs McCartney's wooden leg that are at least balancing precariously on, if not crossing, that fine line of taste.
As always, the performers - Andrew Spiers, Ben Wilson, Gemma Arrowsmith and Jessica Ransom - are superb and exhaustingly energetic for the full hour; musical director Pete Smith joins everything seamlessly and there is great singing, acting and dancing with some excellent choreography from Jack Rebaldi. Director Gemma Gross has kept the frenetic pace of past shows that delivers new gags constantly, hardly giving the audience a chance to breath between laughs.
This is a must in Edinburgh for any fans of satire, but please don't be like around a quarter of the audience on the night I went and arrive late as you will not only annoy the rest of the audience but are sure to miss a few moments of comedy gold.