‘I used to be a cool young comic with cool young fans,” bewails Jamali Maddix. He’s certainly one of the most intriguing, though not perfectly formed, comic voices of his generation, with little by way of filter and never one to be swayed by on-message orthodoxy. He may now be moving into middle age, at 34, with touring show Aston, but this isn’t a step forward – just another characteristic compound of fearless and sometimes lazy thinking, pitted with brilliant moments casually moved on from and underdeveloped.
One thing the Ilford man has never been backwards about is his own delinquency, and Aston opens with a life update from a man who self-identifies as “toxic but cheeky”. He’s no longer cheating on his girlfriends. He held out for only three days before surrendering his ID to access porn online. He’s also now using Ozempic to control his weight (cue a fun gag about submitting naked pics of himself to a pervy doctor) and addicted to the TikTok output of former light-entertainment icon Michael Barrymore.
The running Barrymore gag is the one you’d expect from any comic with a wicked sense of humour. The show’s best section finds Maddix addressing himself to racism and British identity. Again, the quality veers wildly, from a choice line on Nigel Farage (“He’s got poor people thinking other poor people made them poor”) to a glib remark about small boats. But this is the section where Maddix’s own thinking expands, as he conjures with the idea and lives of poor white people (some in his own family), marvels about the quantity of hate in the air, and imagines racists being given, if only for 24 hours, the country they think they’d like to live in.
This sequence finds our host contemplating his own stake in Britishness. What does it mean to have a face that represents the new Britain – and be told you can’t be British? When Maddix is good, he’s profane, surprising and insightful all at the same time. He’s just never quite as rigorously good as he could be.