HOWZAT

When you see a comedian find his voice, it’s a thrilling thing. And the 40-year-old Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert has found his twice.

The first time was his first Edinburgh show, in 2004. Telling the story of his fictitious home town of Llanbobl, he wove a warped, whimsical fantasy with a dark and dubious manner that was all its own. He’d cracked it, I thought - this was a shtick that could go anywhere, from tough clubs to Royal Variety Performance.

I was wrong. Llanbobl proved too limiting for a busy circuit comic. Over the next two years, Gilbert became the voice of Wales - literally, in an ad campaign - and mounted a further two Fringe shows. They were good. But they betrayed a tension between Gilbert as a character and Gilbert as a stand-up. You didn’t quite know how to take him any more.

And then he cracked it. Last year’s show, Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie saw Gilbert turning the whole world into Llanbobl. He recounted the story of a fit of fury he had at the Knutsford Service Station, and the silliness of service culture had never been so palpable.

He was both utterly enraged and utterly relaxed about it. And he proved he’d found a way to be himself and speak to a bigger audience. “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising,” Cyril Connolly wrote. Well, Rhod Gilbert isn’t promising any more. He’s delivering.
DOMINIC MAXWELL

FILM: STEVE MCQUEEN

It’s perhaps a little early in artist Steve McQueen’s career to start using terms like ‘auteur cinema’, but with his fearless feature film debut, Hunger, he establishes himself as a bold and distinctive new voice in British filmmaking. McQueen demonstrates not only an innate understanding for the medium, he also has the confidence in his own storytelling ability to break the established rules of cinema, reshaping them to work for him. He is able to convey a curious, savage beauty even as he tackles a seriously ugly period of British history.

It is McQueen’s approach to the structure of his film that is most daring. The central character is the controversial, charismatic IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. But he does not become main character until towards the end of the first hour. Instead, we are first introduced to one of the prison guards, following the quotidian details of his morning routine. Crucially, this humanises the men on the other side of the bars to the prisoners whose stories we later follow. But McQueen’s masterstroke comes in with a breathtaking twenty minute single shot that captures a charged battle of wits between Sands and a priest. It’s exhilarating, and it’s quite unlike anything that has been attempted in cinema before. For that alone, Steve McQueen deserves to win.
WENDY IDE

LITERATURE: ROSE HEINEY

You’ll struggle to find a shrewder, more bleakly comic debut novel than The Days of Judy B, published early last year when its author, Rose Heiney, was, like her narrator Judy, just 23 years old. Judy has a split personality: as a Sunday newspaper columnist, she leads a glib, glossy, gossipy life of amusing boy troubles and daring fashion purchases, but in her East London flat she is a sloppy, self-loathing, overweight, alcoholic virgin. Judy is fascinated by the story of Donald Crowhurst, and the novel begins as, like the delusional round-the-world sailor, she begins to stray dangerously off-course.

As a survivor of stand-up comedy competitions, Heiney has honed her witty prose to a sharp point (recently winning the 4Talent Award for best Comedy Writer). As the daughter of the broadcasters Paul Heiney and Libby Purves, she is media-savvy enough to produce a satire of the world of lifestyle journalism. And as somebody who has experienced emotional peaks and troughs, she writes convincingly and unsentimentally about Judy’s downward mental spiral.

Judy B has already been optioned for TV, and Heiney is working on the adapatation alongside her second novel. The Days of Rosie H are just beginning.
TOM GATTI