Adam Kay is known to many as one half of the Amateur Transplants, the piano-playing medical students (now qualified doctors) who have learned that laughter is the best medicine. Their longstanding routine is to take a well-known song and rewrite the lyrics to deal with a far less wholesome topic, the more distasteful the better. Thus the Jam’s Going Underground became London Underground to heap venom on striking Tube drivers, giving them their best known work and the title of this year’s Fringe show.
Confessedly not a showman, Kay devotes little time to audience interaction; he knows what we’re here for and he delivers a tight pacy set of old favourites, new keepers and sequence of punchy one-verses that keeps the spirits high and the belly aching. Extreme’s More Than Words becomes Northern Birds, and you’d be well advised not to take your Newcastle girlfriend to this gig. Likewise a victim of child abuse or the terminally ill… Or the self-consciously obese! Oh and you might want to leave Gran at home too. High on value but low on taste, Kay cuts damn close to the bone, but trust him, he’s a doctor.
5/5
Alan Cox
