1000 Tiny Birds

Glenn Moore (WIP)

Monkey Barrel, 2023-08-14

Our only punishingly early start of the fringe, at a horrific pre-noon 11.20am, is Glenn Moore doing a work in progress show alongside a reprise of last year’s excellent, under-award-nominated show Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, Glenn I’m Sixty Moore. The WIP turns out to be for an upcoming Radio 4 show, Glenn Moore’s Almanac (and you’ll be delighted to hear that, yes, he’s managed to get a joke from that title which really made me laugh), the concept of which is exploring what Glenn was doing on days of historical note. We are treated to two episodes, explicitly just being read from an iPad and notes being made as he went. We hear first of his exploits on the day of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, trying to win the affection of a female newsreader he’s working with, then later the events of New Year’s Eve 1999 and being invited to a party as an eight year old. True to Moore’s style, these are each densely packed with jokes, some standalone, some self-referential, and often impossible to tell which will turn out to be which. To my ears, these really aren’t that far from being ready to hit the airwaves.