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Basil Brush’s Family Fun Show

Basil Brush’s Family Fun Show

by Flora Gosling

Curiously, Basil Brush’s Family Fun Show isn’t listed under “puppetry”. Sometimes stardom means abandoning the genre that birthed you, like how we rarely hear Mr Bean referred to as a clown. But puppet or not, Basil Brush is the most famous fox in show business, and doesn’t he know it? In this children’s show we are here to celebrate Basil’s 60th birthday – but don’t expect him to act like a regular 60-year-old.

As a character and an entertainer, he is as cheesy, charismatic and hilarious as ever. He makes the most of simple jokes that we forget children haven’t seen before, like descending smoothly into a box via an “escalator” and a “lift”. Ironically he is at his best when reprimanding the audience for not laughing enough, something that is usually a sure-fire way to destroy whatever atmosphere they have left. Basil sighing dramatically and lamenting “oh Edinburgh, I wasn’t born here but I feel like I might be dying here” is funnier and more sophisticated than a show like this has any right to be.

And, sure enough, it is much more sophisticated than the rest of the show actually is. Star presenter aside, the actual content of the show is like any generic children’s variety show you have seen before. They throw packets of crisps into the audience, spray them with water guns, and have them dance to a party playlist that hasn’t been updated since 2007. But most egregious is the toilet humour. It starts subtle, enough to entertain children but not enough to annoy parents, and ends in an agonisingly long scene of Basil’s co-host Martin farting dressed as Elsa from Frozen. As a performance, Basil Brush’s Family Fun Show is crude, unmemorable and cheap, but it couldn’t be presented by a classier character. 

Three stars.