Peter Kay, parochialism and post-Brexit humour

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News that comedian Peter Kay will tour the UK next month following a 12-year absence from the stage has been greeted with a warm glow of excitement. Kay, who comes from Bolton, near Manchester, is one of Britain’s most beloved comics. A stout 49-year-old with a penchant for shiny, short-sleeved shirts, he looks like a darts pro, talks pure Lancashire and brims with a toddler’s charisma. Those unfamiliar with his oeuvre might liken him to a northern James Corden, if Corden were better at acting, or charming or funny.

Kay’s return to the stage comes at a time when Britain is struggling to define its post-Brexit identity. For all the attempts by Rishi Sunak to propel the idea that the UK is thrusting, forward-looking and entrepreneurial, the nurses are still planning to go on strike, a coffee costs nearly £4 and we’re buying hot-water bottles to counter the need to put on the heating. Rather than levelling up, Britons seem to be in a state of angsty frustration.

To that end Kay is in many ways the perfect spokesman for the new Britain. He speaks to the demographic less concerned with the urbane and global. Kay has never been metropolitan, and his humour has always been grounded in the normal. His fans will look to him as a source of comfort through a winter of inflationary outrage and shortage.

Not that he’s likely to address those things. Kay has never so much as murmured a word of politics: he leaves that for other comics. (In another unlikely renaissance, Ben Elton has also re-emerged after decades to revive his eye-swivelling routine of politically righteous indignation. Likewise Alexei Sayle, who is currently flooding the airwaves with his screeds about modern communism.)

Kay is cheeky not angry, with smacks of occasional curmudgeon. His material — Rich Tea biscuits, VHS machines, the Top 40 — is a balm of nostalgic reverie mixed with random memorabilia. Audiences pack his stadiums to weep with laughter at his impressions of someone using a landline while trying to scrawl down a note with a broken biro. A landline! Kay tickles the generational divide by pointing out modern “phenomena”. His most popular joke describes a boomer parent baffled by “garlic bread” and defeated by modern technology.

His 12-year absence from live touring may see Kay drawing on things that feel more millennial. But I doubt it. His brand of humour remains beloved because it harks back to a bygone era scored by a retro pop soundtrack. It’s innocent and affectionate: it’s wedding discos and crisps and aunties who aren’t really aunties. And while Kay gently digs at parochialism he never actually mocks it.

I don’t want to listen to yet another clever dick in a T-shirt riffing on the new cultural agenda

Not that Kay doesn’t have his detractors. His live audience appears to be almost entirely white and his routines speak to highly specific cultural markers. A rather snippy recent blog featured on the box office website Ticketsource found Kay to be “only” the 10th most popular UK comedian, with a comparatively small social-media following. Apparently, edgier comics such as Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr (I mean, who the hell were they asking?) have far more influence. Not that Kay gives a monkey’s: he’s too busy reaping the profits.

I imagine Kay, or at least his stage persona, as embodying the voter who politicians are now desperate to harness; a wary, wealthy, self-made family man with no interest in Westminster bubbles. If I were Sunak or Keir Starmer I would be campaigning outside the stadium. Kay’s audience is exactly the crowd politicians need to win over. It’s a similar demographic to the one that kicked off about the recent banishment of the Bounty — a marketing stunt that suggested the chocolate bar was being removed from boxes of Celebrations. It later transpired the elimination of the coconut confection had been widely misreported. But the mutiny about the Bounty gave voice to those who lament the creeping erosion of tiny enjoyments.

For those people who want to snack in peace and moan about broken biros, Peter Kay makes the Everyman feel seen again. He embraces people who might feel estranged even while poking fun at them. His genius is in uniting left and right in mutual recognition at the daftness of human behaviour. And I am here for it. I don’t want to listen to yet another clever dick in a T-shirt riffing on the new cultural agenda. I don’t want political satire or another late-night wisecracking comic. I want to put the real world far from my mind and laugh about something harmless and uncontroversial. Times are grim enough right now. Send in the man playing Queen with a shovel.

Email Jo at jo.ellison@ft.com

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