Manchester Arena
After 12 years away from the stage, the slimmed-down entertainer is more unapologetically nostalgic than ever
No hotcake ever sold in greater quantity than tickets for Peter Kay’s new tour: at one stage in my own bid for access, I was numbered 450,000 in the online queue. It’s a fair bet, then, that Kay will break the record he himself set in 2010 for the biggest-selling standup tour of all time – 1.2 million people saw that show. But is all the fuss justified? And will the long wait for this new show, fraught with speculation about Kay’s health and the likelihood of him ever touring again, prove worthwhile?
If there was any doubt, it was dispelled the moment the slimmed-down 49-year-old stepped onstage at the Manchester Arena. The reception was long, loud and, for Kay, tear-jerking. He took a pause to settle himself: “How’m I supposed to do bloody comedy now?” Not much doubt, though, how Kay was going to do comedy. The two-hour show scarcely deviated from the everyman formula that has made him such a popular success. Some of it, indeed, was almost parodically formulaic, as the Bolton man riffed on modern technology (“What did we do before Amazon? Catalogues!”), led a singalong of 1970s advertising jingles, and gave his famous “garlic bread” routine an Italian makeover.
