Mark Thomas: 40 In Stand-Up Years

Mark Thomas is at The Stand Comedy Club on Saturday 12 December, with the show starting at 4:00pm. He's calling it 40 In Stand-Up Years, and the title does the heavy lifting: he's marking four decades at the mic. He describes the set as a taster menu of jokes, rants and rants, so you'll get a good cross-section of where he's come from rather than just a single new show.

If you're not familiar with the name, Thomas is billed as one of the oldest surviving alternative comics, and the career that spans those forty years is a strange, sprawling thing. He's won eight awards for performing and four for his human rights work. He did six series of The Mark Thomas Comedy Product for Channel 4, wrote six books and five play scripts, and fronted five series of The Manifesto for Radio 4 along with three Dispatches episodes. He's also sued the police and won three times, curated and authored two art exhibitions with artist Tracey Moberly, and holds a Guinness World Record for staging 20 protests in 24 hours.

That's the public-facing side of it, but there's a fair bit more under the surface. He once walked 724km the length of the Israel Wall in the West Bank, opened a comedy club in Palestine with Dr Sam Beale, and campaigned for trade union recognition for cinema workers. The critics have had their say too: Clownster called him a 'firebrand of a clown', The Scotsman named him 'one of Britain's greatest storytellers', and Theatre Cat described him as 'the most intelligent of the modern leftist stand-ups'.

It's a lot of ground to cover in one afternoon, and that's exactly what the 'taster menu' is for. The show is at The Stand, 420 Great Western Road, Glasgow, G49HZ, on Saturday 12 December at 4:00pm.