Nick Helm review: Nobody Gets Out Alive – Satanic metalhead on stage and riot in the bar | comedy

‘WYou weren’t that way through there?!” We’re in the lobby of Glasgow’s Stand Comedy Club, where the finale of Nick Helm’s touring show has been inescapably moved. After a long intermission and the hall being emptied for a medical emergency, the comedian performs for a group of punters willing to wait until 11 a.m. for the show’s closing moments. Helm sits at the bar. His hardliners semi-circle around him. No other audience on his tour will get such an intimate experience – and hence the laughs (more than It used to be on the main stage) it would be noisy.

No doubt Helm would have preferred for his show to go on without calling an ambulance for a sick audience member. But it allows him to build a relationship, and provide an unforgettable experience, that would not have seemed possible otherwise. The first three quarters of the show find the 45-year-old ranting to his audience as usual, recalling being bullied as a child and touching on struggles with depression that he has chronicled in previous shows. He also talks about his search for a home and the drift of his career since his sitcom “Uncle” ended in 2017.

This stuff is distinctly meandering, unedited and unfulfilling with laughter, with the compensation coming in the form of Helm’s emotional honesty and sense of his own absurdity — or misery, according to a routine about his relationship with the “body lamp.” It’s also elevated by the staccato rock songs performed by the gravel-voiced metalhead, from opening single Dump the Motherfucker to a closer that takes Satanism to a raunchy new level.

At its best, the series has the inviting specificity that comes when one actor is doing their own thing and no one else is — witness Helm roaring his song Nosferatu (about being sucked dry by a vampire — or is it a sex toy?) while decked out in a pair of fairy-lit butterfly wings. Then come those unexpected closing stages, a storytelling session for two dozen stragglers in the lobby, when — offstage, unbowed, just for us — it’s most fun.