Alternative stand-up show by Mark Thomas marking 40 years at the microphone, mixing jokes, rants and political mayhem.
Mark Thomas is at the South Street Arts Centre on Thursday 5 November, with 40 in Stand-Up Years marking four decades since he first stepped up to the microphone. He's billed himself as one of the oldest surviving alternative comics, and the show is built around that: an hour of jokes, rants and political mayhem that turns 'what the f*ck is going on' into a proper stand-up set.
It's a wide-reaching career he's drawing from. There were six series of The Mark Thomas Comedy Product on Channel 4, six books and five play scripts, and five series of The Manifesto on Radio 4. He's also done three Dispatches for Channel 4. Along the way he's picked up eight awards for performing and four more for his human rights work, and he holds a Guinness World Record for staging 20 protests in 24 hours.
That campaigning side has taken him far beyond the comedy circuit. He walked 724km along the length of the Israel Wall in the West Bank, co-founded a comedy club in Palestine with Dr Sam Beale, and took on the police in court — a suit he won three times. Much of the material comes from that intersection of comedy and activism, so it's as much about the things he's done off-stage as the jokes he tells on it.
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The show runs from 8.00pm to 10.00pm at the South Street Arts Centre, 21 South Street, Reading RG1 4QU.
