In this sweet debut Fringe hour, Lewisham-born-and-bred stand up Toussaint Douglass threatens us with 55 minutes of jokes about pigeons.
As a stickler for high-concept shows, I was a little disappointed to discover this was a colossal overstatement: there’s maybe 15 minutes on the ubiquitous winged rats. But they’re 15 good minutes, not least the show’s brilliantly chaotic cold open where Douglass makes one audience member drive a stuffed pigeon strapped to a remote control car around the room while others are made to try and feed it bread.
For the most part Accessible Pigeon Material is a show about Douglass and his family, though he has a pleasingly idiosyncratic way of approaching what might otherwise be fairly humdrum material. There’s some great gags about Lewisham and some charming stuff about living with his ‘87-year-old flatmate’ (ie his nan, for whom pigeons were emblematic of the UK when she arrived with the Windrush generation). Best of all is a sequence where he roleplays his geezerish father while an audience member is forced to play the part of a younger Douglass trying to get his pathologically undemonstrative old man to say ‘I love you’.
That this last gag isn’t pursued with quite the self lacerating viciousness it could be is indicative of the fact that Douglass basically seems like a really nice guy, making a show about the things that interest him (which includes pigeons). Perhaps he’d benefit from more rigour in the future: does he want to push the cute stuff about his family, the uncomfortable stuff about his family, or the mad bits about birds? At the minute it feels like a slightly disjointed – albeit thoroughly winsome – hybrid of all three.
