Super Tuesday in Epsom

Super Tuesday, they called it in the US. Well it was pretty good over here too, finishing my fishing column just in time for a few pancakes before we drove over to Epsom to see Michael McIntyre at the playhouse.

I love pancake Tuesday. For a great recipe read this. Pancake eating is quite a social arrangement with people leaving the table in relays to prepare the next pancake. George was in charge last night. His style is to flip the pancake while I'm more of a tosser. That's what my friends tell me anyway.

You may have seen McIntyre on TV last year when he appeared Live at the Appollo - the full performance is spread over three clips. If you haven't caught any of his stage performances so far you might try to get a ticket for one of the shows in his new tour. I think he's one the most talented young comedians in the UK - the south's answer to Peter Kay.

His best known routine (featured in the Youtube clips) is where he demonstrates a more efficient way of walking, skipping from A to B with synchronised arms. But it wasn't part of last night's show until he asked for questions from the audience at the end. "Do the skipping" shouted one bloke. So McIntyre obliged and it was only then that I realised his act was unknown to most of those there.

He's southern and talks with a posh accent - not the usual ingredients for gritty live comedy - but his humour is sharply framed from observations of daily life such as rail commuting and motorway driving. They're not just observations of human behaviour either. He puts our unspoken but recognisable thoughts in to words.

He's a genuinely funny man who knows how to work an audience and whose performance is as yet uncluterred by the intrusions of stardom. If he can maintain that common touch he's going to be a big name. Too much TV exposure, of course, can drain the creativity in this kind of work, condemning talent to a future of well-paid panel games such as QI and Have I got News For You.

Perhaps this is the pattern of comedy success - come up the hard way, playing the halls, before enjoying the easier pickings of TV where your talent, in time, begins to go in odd directions (a sure sign when you start doing travel programmes)and you must make way for the next hungry young thing. Either that, or you can be Ken Dodd.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Pole

When I was young I used to read about the exploits of Scott of the Antarctic, David Livingstone and Ernest Shackleton. I liked the idea of travelling and exploring distant parts of the globe.

What training would I need, I wondered? A military career perhaps, or something using geography or cartography?

As it turns out today such skills are not nearly as useful as those of the stand-up comedian. Ask any BBC producer.

Last month there was Victoria Wood floating around the globe's former pink bits in "Victoria's Empire." Prior to that there were the travelogues featuring comedy actor Michael Palin. Even Billy Connolly has turned his touring in to a kind of travel epic. Now I see that Channel Five has hopped on the bandwagon with "Paul Merton in China."

I wonder if Scott told jokes about penguins or whether Mungo Park ever played the Glasgow Empire? Were Lewis and Clark role models for Laurel and Hardy? After all, Laurel and Hardy did make a film called Way out West.

The BBC has missed a trick or two in the past. Otherwise we might have seen Morcambe and Wise on the Eiger or Tommy Cooper of Khartoum. At least the Carry On team made Carry On Up The Jungle.

What does the future hold? Maybe we'll see Peter Kay in Amarillo The Hard Way or Jasper Carrot in Carrot Continental or Rowan Atkinson in the Thin Blue Planet. The possibilities are endless.

Metrosexuals

A conversation about commodities yesterday deviated somewhat in to a discussion of metrosexuals. I must confess that I was ignorant of the term. So when it was explained that a metrosexual is someone who is not gay, or not necessarily gay, but who is in touch with his feminine side, I thought: "that's for me." I have bags of empathy and enjoy the company of women.

Now I'm not so sure; about the metrosexual tag, that is. At the time I was wearing a pink shirt which apparently ticked a box. Another useful accessory, I was told, is a "man bag". I sort of have one of those but don't use it much. In fact I've never used it. It's a woolly, ethnic thing I bought in India or possibly Africa, or was it Leeds? No matter.

I mentioned it to my eldest son, John, 22, this afternoon. It's more than a man bag, he says. Metrosexuals are big in to moisturisers and spend quite a lot on cosmetics. "You know how women take a long time to get ready before they go out? Well metrosexual blokes do that," he says.

One of his friends waxes himself, says John. There is also a vogue, it seems, for men trimming their pubic hair. "Some girls really like it. We had a lot of discussions at university about that."

So it's a little bit more than washing under your armpits and splashing on a bit of aftershave, then? "Some blokes shave their armpits," he says. What? Armpits? Shave? I feel like Peter Kay's grandad when he first heard of cheesecake: "Cheese? Cake? Cheese and cake?

I don't suppose it's so long ago that my own grandad would have been scrubbing up in a tin bath sitting on a clippy hearth rug. What goes around comes around.