Chris McCausland: ‘Yonks!’ review – mischievous Strictly winner goes back to the day job | Comedy

‘Twenty one years of hard graft on the comedy scene, to now be best known for dancing.” The ironies of his newfound celebrity are not lost on Chris McCausland, not only the winner of last year’s Strictly Come Dancing but a contestant so well-loved, his success so cheering, he’s been credited with redeeming the entire franchise. Now he’s back to the thing he’s been longing to do, he says, after four exhausting months of cha cha, quickstep and American smooth: sitting on a stool for a while, telling jokes.

He’s good at it: those 21 years weren’t wasted. ‘Yonks!’, by his own admission, is about nothing in particular. It plants a flag in familiar standup territory and – hey, the guy’s tired – seldom roams far beyond. There’s a lot of “back in the day”, as McCausland reminisces about his delinquent childhood and life before smart technology. There’s the odd name-dropping yarn from his life as a TV star, but they’re outnumbered by tales insisting upon his Everybloke credentials – like the resolutely anti-PC joke set in his local pub, or the closing anecdote about a recent rectal examination.

I sometimes wonder if middle-aged male standups book themselves rectal examinations purely for the 10 minutes of material sure to accrue. If McCausland can’t make the subject feel fresh, he does animate it with a very vivid image of himself and his urologist at dinner, and deploys his blindness to give an amusingly icky situation some additional ick. Such is his habit: his disability is never centre-stage, and referred to only when some mention can make a funny routine still funnier.

What the show isn’t is personal, or emotionally significant to even the slightest degree. At the start, McCausland tells us that he never anticipated Strictly would be so emotional – but that “if anyone cries tonight, something’s gone drastically wrong”. Fair enough: it’s a comedy show. But there’s still some gear-grinding required when McCausland, having held TV viewers’ hearts in the palm of his hand, retreats to standup mode: hardbitten, a bit cynical, and revealing as little of his private self as he can get away with.

In its place, a blokey, anti-intellectual but fun-loving and self-mocking Chris. Material about meeting Prince William isn’t for me, and there’s a rudimentary story about dick-swinging with fellow comic Brian Conley. But more often that tittersome sense of mischief makes for a fun evening. The picture McCausland paints of his “little shit” schoolboy self, the most common words on his report card “potential” and “however”, is an arresting one. That joke about nicknames for his drinking pals in the pub is a keeper, and the tale of his unusual testicular affliction (memorably branded “old lady’s leg balls”) converts that comedy open-goal with aplomb. It’s less American smooth than Liverpudlian coarse – but Strictly fans quickstepping to the box office are unlikely to be disappointed.