The Horne Section live show consists of five musicians and a comedian (Alex Horne) messing about for two hours. They do music-based jokes, comedy songs, and silly dances. It is incredibly accessible for all ages (as long as you don’t mind swearing!) and all levels of comedy and music experience. There is not a lot else to it - no overarching theme, no moment of sad reflection at the beginning of the third act. I found it absolutely delightful.
While you didn’t need to understand the in jokes to enjoy the show, they added a nice touch for hardcore fans (I think there were a few in). When Alex pulled out a Taskmaster envelope, a genuine thrill ran around the audience. There was an audible “ooooh”. The task that they performed was satisfyingly silly and honestly, deeply engaging.
The show felt anarchic - like the very best kind of children’s tv show - which occasionally descended into actual mild peril. There was a routine where two of the performers dance, blindfolded, that could have resulted in a mild concussion and I broken leg if it had gone wrong, and there was also a properly dangerous sequence involving tennis balls. I really enjoyed this element - it felt satisfyingly naughty, like a cast of Beano characters brought to life.
If I were to have a quibble with this show - and I mean this in the spirit of constructive feedback - it is a massive sausage fest of a thing. The main players are six men, and that’s fair enough. But there is also audience interaction, and out of seven people they chose, only one was a woman - and she was the only one they didn’t invite up on stage. This meant that every one of the 12 people I saw on stage during the show was a white dude, age about 30-40… Why? There were plenty of women in their 50s there. They might want to wear the hoover heads too.
If we hadn’t gone to a show that night, my husband would have spent the evening endlessly refreshing liveblogs about Brexit and gloomily reading out the results to me. No one wants to do that with their Tuesday night. Instead, we went and sat in a packed hall and laughed at six men in suits making stupid jokes and singing silly songs, over and over again. The Horne Section was clearly a better option. There was no politics in this performance, no self reflection and no agenda. This was a real treat of a show that lets you check your brain at the door and just enjoy something, uncomplicatedly and fully.