Stewart Francis Live – Tour de Francis [DVD]

As a big fan of comedians that specialise in one-liners – think Tim Vine or Milton Jones – and impressed by his brief appearances on panel shows, it would be obvious for me to pick up the ‘Tour De Francis’ DVD by ‘Stewart Francis’.

Delivering a seventy-minute set he was surprisingly more adult than his television appearances would suggest with many politically incorrect and close to the knuckle jokes strewn between his family-friendly one-liners. He’s certainly no Frankie Boyle but no Tim Vine either.

There has been a lot of attention paid to the DVD though with a special ‘Mock The Week’ opening to backstage filmed sections at the end and in between the main set and the encore, plus a selection of manufactured out-takes and a possibly also manufactured Q&A that bounce happily between funny, surreal and unusual, with more laughs than not. The whole DVD package comes in at around ninety minutes, so better than Milton Jones’ feature-less DVD but not exactly Tim Vine’s all-out bonus-fest.

The set itself features jokes you’ll have heard on his Mock The Week appearances but these are few and far between and the vast majority of the jokes are brand new if you’ve not seen him live. As I said there’s adult content here to justify its 15 rating but, for all the politically incorrect jokes, it’s all done with his tongue firmly in cheek and he’s good at taking swipes at all areas and peoples, including himself.

There are jokes for everyone in the set from plays-on-words, to visual jokes, to laughing at social stereotypes. There is some, limited, audience interaction and the odd lapse into sounding very much like Russell Kane.

As with all good shows there are running jokes and themes throughout it, and there’s much more of a loose story feel than Jones or Vine’s sets have. A lot of jokes are neatly tied together in a skit near the end which is satisfying for the audience.

Only a weird selection of back-slapping slips dropped in between the slides of the credits seem out of place with an expected joke to end them never coming.

If you like one-liners and puns with an adult edge then you’ll really enjoy this, and some of the extra bits filmed mean the extras are well worth diving into, plus they’re not massively long or tedious to sit through.

7/10