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Mark Thomas: 50 Things About Us review – an inventory of Britishness

Radlett Centre, Hertfordshire
This grab-bag show sheds little light on our political travails but it’s stuffed with funny caricatures and plenty of myth-busting

How did we get here? asks Mark Thomas. His new show, 50 Things About Us, promises little-known facts about the UK to explain our current predicament. Six per cent of UK land mass is grouse moor, he claims – while there are only 22 countries that we haven’t invaded (yet). It’s a compelling conceit, even if Thomas’s inventory of Britishness – demanding that, for a change, we see ourselves as others see us – sheds little new light on Brexit, Boris and our political travails.

That is partly because our host doesn’t stay on topic, as he ties up loose ends from previous shows and teases new material (about displaced Chagos Islanders and their fledgling football team) from his next. His thesis that our EU exit is the last spasm of the British empire has been widely aired elsewhere. But it needs restating, and Thomas gives it a characteristically emphatic workout, with red-faced routines about Gibraltar (whose claim to Britishness he finds less persuasive than the Calais refugee camp), the national anthem and the larcenous British Museum.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/399G8TB

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