Has Romesh Ranganathan hit his peak? It depends how the ‘peak’ is defined.
Certainly, if it’s about exposure – he can’t climb much higher. His credits, just in the last twelve months, read like a convincing supporting application for career burnout. Amazon juggernaut Last One Laughing, Celebrity Traitors, another season hosting The Weakest Link, another season of Rob & Romesh, an appearance in West End play Woman in Mind, two twice-weekly podcasts. And of course, lest you forget, the leading man in the now-infamous BBC advert: ‘What has the BBC ever done for me?’
This cultural ubiquity is the context his new stand-up show, ‘Romesh Ranganathan Will Change Your Life’, is built upon. ‘‘Yeah, I know, I know. I’m in too much s***.’’ So goes one of the first lines uttered on stage, following a brief video clip in which he collapses into the corner of a white-walled room, as recordings of his critics stagger over one another, each one louder than the next. Eventually, a call to arms – his mum tells him he needs to get out – he smells – and with that, he walks on stage.
Where do you go when you’re the guy that’s everywhere? Back on stage, of course – but not without some level of existential reckoning. All that exposure, after all, comes at a cost – there’s the racist abuse, delivered every other day directly to his inbox. There’s the self-appointed critics, who disparage his projects with varying levels of nuance and linguistic aplomb (some take issue with his affiliation with the BBC, some just say he’s bad at jokes). Is this tour some kind of bizarre reconciliation between self-flagellation and professional justification? It’s fine, he’s in therapy now, on Zoom. He can close his laptop and leave the room if the therapist asks a question he doesn’t want to answer.
It’s not easy being a self-proclaimed national treasure. Even more so if he’s known for being ‘a man of the people’, but doesn’t fancy queuing at the theme park. There’s some nice easy reading, but Romesh also regularly steers the focus into his own trauma – a childhood in Crawley, where he still lives, and where he is beginning his tour. His dad, a serial womanizer, abandoned the family, leading them to spend almost a year living in a bed and breakfast. At his lowest points, he listened to 80s music for comfort – ‘There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)’. Just at the moments when the set could almost veer into pathos, he swerves back into the present, with quips on food waste bins, midnight snacks, and Rylan Clark’s views on immigration ‘‘They all get iPads!’. There’s some choice impressions of his wife, Leesa, and his 17-year-old son, who are seemingly not altogether as impressed with their deadpanning housemate as the audience. But all the tightrope walking between tragedy and farce can become dizzying. At times, jokes feel closer to the set-up of an emotional reckoning that remains unrealised – while confessions border on a darker realm of comedy, that lies just out of reach. Is this optimism, or a lack of courage? It likely depends on your appetite for comedy, on whether you believe it’s an act of reassurance, or a force for provocation.
Romesh is aware we are living in what he refers to as ‘divisive times’. But, he’s keen to emphasise he’s not here to take sides, or indeed, even to call out the audience – ‘you can relax now’. In the final interlude, after an extended bit on a family swim-session gone awry, there’s the sense of him closing the laptop, and walking away. And, in perhaps the closest he comes to revelation, Annie Lennox’s signature melisma rings out as he leaves the stage.
