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“A bumbling retired entertainer shows us just how comedy should be done...”



“Count Arthur Strong - The Musical”


“A brilliant comedy creation...I laughed until I hurt”


“One of the greatest 'undiscovered' comedy characters on the Fringe is due for recognition”



“Aspiring character comics would do well to come worship at the altar of Count Arthur Strong”



“If there’s one must see on the fringe each year, it has to be Count Arthur Strong”



“His skill - physical and verbal - is absolutely extraordinary. The sheer originality is spellbinding…”



“Count Arthur Strong could become one of the great British comic characters of our time”



“The funniest comic character you’re ever likely to see”



The Independent's team of critics in Edinburgh choose their must-see events

Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! Tomorrow, Today! Radio 4 If all radio comedies - or continuity announcing, or economics reporting, for that matter - were like Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show!, I doubt I'd ever listen to anything else. The count, a fictional retired entertainer of the old school with whistling dentures and a daily appointment with the cooked meats section at his local minimart, is currently rambling unsteadily towards the end of a fourth series, after which no sound but that of tumbleweed is likely to emanate from my house between 11.30am and midday on Fridays.

Hope over experience every time, is all I'm saying. This time it'll be different, you think. Put on the radio at elevenses or teatime and you'll be rewarded with something other than the "hilarious" adventures of a flaky public-sector worker (it's Clare in the Community on Wednesdays at the moment, but there'll be another along in a minute) or a fourth wall-busting exposé of life in the recording booth (at the moment Tomorrow, Today!, of which more later).

Count Arthur Strong . . . so outperforms the rest of Radio 4's comedy output - Down the Line included, which does nothing more than remind me of On the Hour and Chris Morris's early-Nineties Radio 1 show, and causes me to wish they both still existed - that it sounds as if it's doing a little victory jig on the roof of Broadcasting House. It's the sound of pent-up dementedness being unleashed and the burden of upholding civic values being tossed to the wind, the sound of the BBC becoming something else for half an hour every week.

Steve Delaney plays Arthur Strong as though he knows this is the man he's destined to turn into. Strong is as iron-willed as he is deluded: he refuses to allow his long-tailed acting career to die and yet he is quite capable of spending several minutes each day haggling over the price of liver and bacon. On 25 January, he was to be heard buying a mobile phone and braying malapropically about his schedule of after-dinner speeches.

"In my game, you've got to be available 25-7, 380 degrees of the year - that's why Edward Woodworm's getting so much work!" He took his new phone to the butcher's, where he inadvertently took a picture of "my friend Wilf holding my black pudding up and sniffing it". Oof! Luncheon vouchers, in his confusion, became "luncheon meat" and Sue Perkins's Scouse call-centre operative was asked, "Are you a real woman?"

It's not so much irreverent as unaware that the need for reverence ever existed, and it is just generally batty in a way that tends not to be tolerated on Radio 4 unless performed by ex-public school boy types who are convinced of their own subversiveness.

Without the energy and spontaneity that recording in front of a live audience gives to any broadcast, radio comedy sounds hermetic and forced: nothing more than a bunch of people reading words to each other in a booth. In theory, you can make radio programming sound as though it could be coming from anywhere, but it takes good acting and superlative writing to make you forget that it's coming from a windowless room with towers of plastic coffee cups making rings on the scripts.

"Music is a wonderful means of communism. No! Communication!" For years, Steve Delaney's senile alter ego, the "doyen of light entertainment" Count Arthur Strong, was a cult favourite. It's a lurid portrait, brilliantly performed, of one man's struggle with dementia, syntax and booze, made all the more tragic by the Count's desperate need to be taken seriously. But now Arthur has his own hit Radio 4 show, and an audience who get the joke. He is celebrating with this showcase of tunes from the musical of his own showbiz life. The London Palladium beckons, he says - as long as we all help out with the funding.

It's a livelier show than some of its predecessors, in which Delaney pushed the painfulness of the joke to dadaist lengths. Here, relief comes in the form of a sidekick, played by Terry Kilkelly: a hapless stage manager made to dress up as the Count for a trompe-l'oeil musical routine set in the Count's changing room. It doesn't go well: "I'm supposed to be looking at myself in the mirror," rages Arthur, "not bloody Boris Karloff."

But the highlights are the glimpses of Arthur's musical: it made me eager to see the finished article. He adopts a hilarious transatlantic twang as the infant version of himself, dispatched to foster parents in Doncaster after the death of his mother. ("If you ever need me," says mum, "just sing a song about me after the interval.") But Arthur has been written off as too old in a recent review, and can't get the thought of plastic surgery out of his mind. "Get yourself a microscope, you won't find a trace," he sings, in an improbable closing rap number, "of anybody's buttocks sitting on my face." The West End won't know what's hit it.

Brian Logan

Yesterday evening, I found myself sitting next to venerable, former Likely Lad Rodney Bewes at Count Arthur Strong - The Musical (Assembly Rooms). He admitted that this wasn't the first time he'd seen the doddery, deluded, Alzheimer's-afflicted old Count (in real life, superb character actor Steve Delaney), which suggests the sort of cachet that the Count has among his fellow thesps. He's long been one of the most reliable acts on the Fringe, a true comedian's comedian, and so he proved again: a blinding show, intensely funny, if at times almost excruciatingly so. As the Count says, by way of welcome, "You're the most terrific bunch, I really do."

Mark Monahan

Unless you're a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe you've probably never heard of Count Arthur Strong. But you will soon, for he is a brilliant comedy creation. Strong is a self-deluded, exceptionally rude and linguistically challenged old luvvie who sounds a bit like Alan Bennett might if he was morphed with Alexei Sayle. In real life, Strong is the comedian Steve Delaney, but reality is thankfully overlooked in this warped day-in-the-life of "a doyen of light entertainment".

The count is preparing for the launch of his autobiography (at his local butcher's), while spitting poisonous barbs at unfortunate TV licensing men, local newspaper journalists and customers in said butcher's shop. I laughed until I hurt, which Strong would be delighted to hear and I only hope R4 turn this into a series next year.

One of the greatest 'undiscovered' comedy characters on the Fringe isdue for recognition, says Mark Monahan

For some years now, Count Arthur Strong has been one of the mostintensely admired acts at the Edinburgh Fringe. Fellow comedians (amongthem no lesser luminaries than Ross Noble and Noel Fielding) discuss himin awed tones; critics fight for superlatives with which to garland him;and yet the chances are that all but the most committed Edinburgh punterhas never even heard of him.

It wasn't until last year that I finally got round to seeing the Countfor myself, but, when I did, I soon found my stomach near-cramped withlaughter.

Like every loopy elderly relative there's ever been, this blundering,deluded old luvvie lurched on stage to deliver an epic lecture, "TheGreatest Story Ever Told", but it rapidly nosedived and concluded withhim magnificently smashed, reeling off a recipe for "lamb of God" andbeating all hell out of a plastic cherub.

The Count - who returns this year for a so-called "book lunch" for hisdiaries, "Through It All I've Always Laughed" - is the creation of SteveDelaney, who writes and performs the show. Meeting him is a doublyintriguing prospect: not only is it impossible to visualise him out ofcharacter, it's also hard to imagine the inspiration for this bizarrecreation, the superannuated boss and sole proprietor of an acting schoolin Doncaster.

In the flesh, Delaney turns out to be recognisable as the man behind theCount, though smaller, younger and (mercifully) saner. In fact, heinsists that there's nothing wrong with the Count's mental health(though he adds, mischievously, "at least, that's how he sees it"), andis not entirely sure himself about the character's origins.

"He's grown in an instinctive way," he says, "but, at the same time, Ithink he's perhaps an amalgam of a million things that I was half awareof as a kid. The place where I grew up in Leeds was full of rich,interesting characters. My next-door neighbour, Uncle Willy, was chiefelectrician at the Grand Theatre, though really of the old school - heused to wear a dinner suit with a wing collar and pince-nez glasses onthe first night. But he was slightly mad as well. So much of it is usingthe shortcomings of a Northerner who thinks he isn't a Northerner - thatspecial sort of pompousness."

Now married with one child, Delaney first created the Count more than 20years ago, when he was a drama student at Central college in London.They were doing a circus project, and he originally conceived him as a"slightly off-the-wall" strongman (hence the self-aggrandising name).

Although the count proved a hit in an end-of-term show, Delaney didnothing more with him, paying his way instead with appearances in AllCreatures Great and Small, Casualty and the like.

In 1997, however, at the repeated suggestion of a former tutor, Delaneygave the old buffoon one more outing, in a north London club, and itwent so well that he decided to take him on permanently. Since then, hehas toured widely, done several Edinburghs and received glowing notices.Yet, for all this, he remains a cult figure.

Delaney acknowledges that this may be because the Count is just "toomuch" for many, as perhaps demonstrated by the markedly premature exitof three people during the first preview in Edinburgh. Those who stayed,however, were well rewarded.

The launch format for "my first dictionaries of mine I've done" givesendless rein to the Count's dementia and delusion. He turns to one ofmany Pepysian pages at random ("Still raining. No Post today. Getbatteries."), while dismissing Mr P as a bad speller and excavating along-forgotten coathanger from the jacket he's wearing ("That's whereone of those is!").

Meanwhile, as the six glasses of bubbly that he drinks progressivelykick in, his presentation descends into a spiral of excruciating,bewildered silences, loopy syntax ("You really are a terrific bunch, Ireally do"), and limitless confusion ("Proceeds are going to myfavourite charity, Stop the Dolphin... No! Stop the Orphan..."), andnever for one second does the mask slip.

Delaney, who guards his age for the sake of the character, admits that alittle more fame wouldn't hurt, but acknowledges that the Count willalways divide audiences much as he has always, apparently, split thePerrier panel.

"There's nothing like playing to a large, packed theatre," he says, "butI have to be realistic about what I do. It's never going to appeal toeverybody - people are going to hate it as much as other people like it.And I think that's the way it should be." The Count couldn't have put itbetter himself.

Mark Monahan

Last year, he failed to deliver a lecture on "Egyptologics". This year it's the story of the Bible that Count Arthur Strong is finding difficult to tell. Steve Delaney's creation is what the Count might call "head and soilders" above the competition. This billious show-biz has been with a slippery grip on reality must be the most perfectly formed comic character on the fringe. Too well realised for some tastes - Delaney steers the Count into the darker regions of senility, where you have to laugh to keep the horror at bay.

The Count struggles - oh, how he struggles! - to keep up the appearance of a well-bred old school gent. But his aloholism, his amnesia and his Doncaster roots keep showing. The Biblical lecture is characteristically bathetic."God called the light day" says the Count "just like we do". He has no truck with Darwin "I've read his book, The Naked Civil Servant," hisses the Count, before bellowing out a correction "The Naked Ape!". Now, the digressions have started. Wartime service with Richard Briers. An argument with a Dictaphone. "Come on, the powers-that-be" implores the Count "Pull your sock up!".

I wondered if Delaney would manage to top last year's coup de theatre with a ventriloquist's mummy. Suffice to say, his re-creation of the Last Supper would curdle communion wine. You won't learn much about the Bible - but aspiring character comics would do well to come and worship at the altar of Count Arthur Strong.

“If there’s one must see on the fringe each year, it has to be Count Arthur Strong”

If there's one must-see on the Fringe each year, it has to be Steve Delaney's astonishing creation Count Arthur Strong. The Count, a Tourette's-afflicted thespian done in by old age and booze, might resemble a waxwork (albeit one on the verge of melting - it's bloody hot in here), but he's clinging to life with as much dignity as he can muster, which isn't very much.

After last year's remarkable lecture on Ancient Egypt (aided by Tiny Tut, a ventriloquist's mummy), this time he intends to approach the mysteries of being, God and all the big issues. If only he wouldn't keep confusing Charles Dance ("the French singer") with Charles Darwin...

As ever, half the room is left almost as bemused as Arthur by the performance, as our host soon strays off the subject, discussing instead his upcoming autobiography, battling with technology's cutting-edge (a dictaphone) and unexpectedly launching into a wine-tasting demonstration ("First rule: never, ever spit any of it out"). You'll discover why Arthur never got the James Bond role, the secrets of Richard Briers's army days, and the choice of music played at the Last Supper. Unmissable, really. As he says, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll... the other one.

The less you know about Count Arthur Strong the better, He runs a performing arts school in Doncaster and considers himself a local luminary. He runs lecture tours like this one on the Bible and last year's ruminations on the ancient Egyptians - and he seems to have many problems, drink being one. but that is about it and that is how is should be.

Because it is far better just to bask in the hilarious lunacy of Steve Delaney's act, his guffaw out loud ramblings - always best when he is talking about something specific - and fierce outbursts where he seems like a Tourettes sufferer without the swearing.

He may not be to everyone's tastes but I for one was on the floor, helpless with laughter. His skill - physical and verbal - is absolutely extraordinary. The sheer originality is spellbinding. The set pieces are brilliant in places.

One of my favourites was his attempt to master a dictaphone. He thought it would answer him and became increasingly frustrated, eventually screaming his "autobook" - his autobiography - into the mouthpiece. Even better was his finale, a singalong where Arthur peeked out of the head of Christ in Leonardo's Last Supper. But you will have to see that one for yourself.

With nurturing the cultish Count Arthur Strong could become one of the great British comic characters of our time. You’ve not seen or heard anything quite like him since the golden days of the Goons, I’m sorry I’ll Read that Again or Beyond the Fringe. Think Alan Partridge’s small town media star, Basil Fawlty’s irascibility and Mr Magoo’s sheer befuddlement, all wrapped up in the demented self-righteousness of a deaf great uncle.

Count Arthur hosts a cable cooking show, is chief communion wine taster and runs a performance academy, all in Doncaster. Tonight he’s giving one of his lectures on the watershed of mankind’s history from Genesis, through to King Richard the Bonaparte and Charles Dance’s Origin of the Species, to Cliff Richard and beyond. But he can’t concentrate: he’s too worked up about the news that a local publishing firm – up until now specialists in laundry tickets – haven’t commissioned an “auto-book of myself”. Succumbing to more tangents than a trig text, the rages get hotter, the nonsense more surreal, the samplings of alter wine deeper, the back to the audience periods longer.

A genuinely agonising, hilarious, intricately woven and bizarre creation.

He’s doing a show called “The Greatest Story Ever Told”. For my money, he’s the funniest comic character you’re ever likely to see. He’s played by Steve Delaney, and he’s a mad old actor with Tourette’s, who runs a school for performing arts and attempts to do lectures which, because he’s not quite in control of his own mind, go totally wrong. He makes me hold my sides with laughter. With a lot of character comics, the joke wears a bit thin after a while, but he’s just perfect. He’s up there with the likes of John Shuttleworth in that vein of laugh-out-loud funny characters.

Count Arthur Strong has again been inexplicably overlooked for the Perrier Prize in favour of a gaggle of stand-ups, all of whom fear and respect the Count for daring to leave gaps where he doesn't talk about himself. Steve Delaney's sublime creation is better than ever this year. The hopelessly alcoholic old timer attempts to give a lecture on the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, yet finds himself inevitably drawn to showbusiness anecdotes and, as ever, the liquid in his glass. Quite brilliant, if bewildering, this is literally the hottest ticket on the Fringe, so bring water with you.