Pascoe proves it was worth the wait

Posted on 27th April 2026

With some of the audience having bought their ticket last year, there were high expectations for the sold-out Comedy Night at the Corn Hall, keen to finally catch Sara Pascoe’s rescheduled headline slot. It was, therefore, fortunate that she was preceded by some very able supporting performers.

First up, Philip Simon delivered a classic MC warm-up, chatting away to the likes of Adam and Tracy. Adam’s unusually robust response to questioning had Simon spoilt for choice, a theme he returned to throughout the night.

Vlad Ilich hails from North Macedonia. There’s no South Macedonia, we were informed, his country instead being the northern part of Macedonia, a centuries-old geographic and ethnographic area that also includes parts of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia. The fact that he got laughs out of that mouthful is testament to his comic skills. Unafraid to take pot shots at the UK, NATO, Putin and chess, Ilich’s comedy was informed by politics without resorting to polemic, all of which made for a lively start to the evening.

Lively is not a word that immediately comes to mind when describing James Ellis, a man who rejoices in his indolence. Cursed with an unhappy face that only emphasised his lugubrious delivery, we learned he was 30% fat and 60% water – leaving 10% for his extraordinary hair. Spurred on by his super fit pal Craig, Ellis had a brief flirtation with a trampoline, before handing over control of his life and his eggs to his long-suffering wife. Ellis’s bathetic delivery was pitch perfect throughout, not least when he offered up a final, killer punch line that had the audience rewinding and rethinking everything they had only just been told.

After the break, Sara Pascoe closed the evening with her signature ruminations about the more curious aspects of life, much of it decidedly fruity. She discussed a very particular anniversary that Paula Radcliffe would rather forget, Lily Allen’s explicitly described hand-delivered bag of goodies, and how the children she loves have nonetheless ruined her life. We may not have empathised with her thoughts on business class air travel, but the mature demographic of the Corn Hall was certainly on board for the anti-climax of the millennium bug. What sets Pascoe apart from her peers is the ability to mix genuine insight with whimsy – who else would examine the perils of being quite famous alongside the photographing of owls?