by Lee Levitt
Brett Goldstein Contains Scenes of an Adult Nature
Pleasance Beneath, Edinburgh (until Aug 26)
****
An anguished soul struggling to stay afloat amid a sea of internet pornography is how Brett Goldstein comes across in a show that appears both to attract a beery crowd and to try to tame and shame them.
Goldstein, who co-starred in Ricky Gervais’s sitcom “Derek” on Channel 4, won the 2013 Dave Channel/Leicester Comedy Festival award for Best New Show for “Brett Goldstein Grew Up in a Strip Club”, telling how he had left his Sutton home to run a strip club in Marbella, bought by his father during a mid-life crisis, and in his latest show he stakes his case at the outset: everything is sold to us through sex. He’s immersed in the subject, having studied film and feminism at the University of Warwick, and gives examples of adverts for high street stores before moving on to dissect the sexism in James Bond films, and then on to the internet. “Broadband is like a tap that leaks filth all over your house,” he says.
His central thesis – and he agonises over whether stand-up comedy is the right place to air his angst, but decides it is because (a) he’s a comedian, and (b) comedy “is the last place where we have no censorship” – is that there’s a lot of hypocrisy about sex. And that politicians, including David Cameron, who last month announced an opt-in filter for online pornography on all British internet providers, are way off the mark because youngsters know how to work new technology better than their parents.
In between his theorising, there’s plenty of anecdotes containing graphic sex, but his conclusion is that porn is ultimately a negative force when it comes down to the nuts and bolts. And he’s been off it, he says, for 142 days.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
