John Lloyd: Emperor of the Prawns

With a hand in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Not the Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image, Have I Got New For You and Blackadder, John Lloyd has more than earned his reputation. Without his efforts, the landscape of comedy, in the UK and beyond, would be unrecognisable.

Hence the difficulty with Emperor of the Prawns: how much of the goodwill extended to Lloyd as a performer is on retainer from his previous work, and how much is due to his talents onstage?

Lloyd would apparently prefer we didn't think about this divide too much. Though he is generally a pleasure to listen to—erudite without pretension, genial but not pandering, and very funny—Emperor of the Prawns suffers a little from its constant name-dropping, making sure we remember precisely who Lloyd is, who he's worked with, and what he's done. Then again, that is Lloyd's life, and he has every right to talk about it. In some cases we should be glad he did: his reminiscences of his late friend Douglas Adams are as touching as they are hilarious.

Emperor of the Prawns, in style somewhere between standup and a self-aware TED talk, is a journey through Lloyd's personal philosophy on life and humanity. Its moments of seriousness and humour almost perfectly counterbalance (understandably, it dips towards the latter), though as a whole, it is something of a curate's egg. Funny voices are not, regrettably, Lloyd's strong point, and such experiments detract from the show's real joy: listening to Lloyd's sardonic observations, meandering inquiries, and autobiographical revery.