‘Being blind I have super powerful hearing’ says David Eagle as he steps onto the small stage in Axbridge Town Hall. ‘In fact,’ he continues ‘I can read your mind. Is David Eagle blind – is the first question people whisper to their friend in the audience – but I can hear them.’ He then talks about the most popular online searches when people Google his name. They are: ‘Is David Eagle Blind?’ and ‘is David Eagle disabled’ and finally his favourite ‘what’s wrong with David Eagle?’
Yes he is blind but the confident way he walks onto the stage, picks up his water bottle and accordion you might not realise it – apart of course he makes no eye contact. However, his connection with the audience is immediate as he speaks very quickly with a Hartlepudlian accent and goes to the nub of each subject he covers. And that upset at least one person in the audience when he sang about killing a dog. ‘What a horrible song,’ came the heckle. And like a top stand-up the heckle was gold dust to David – something he could reference throughout the evening that wowed the audience.
David is also a musician and singer and plays in a band called the Young’uns who are three-time BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winners. Plus he’s appeared on BBC Radio 4 and has won awards as New Comedian Of The Year (Leicester Square Theatre 2019, Bath Comedy Festival 2019, Nottingham Comedy Festival 2018). So it is no surprise that he held the audience’s attention throughout and had the uncanny ability to pick people out in the audience by their laughs or comments – and even spotted that I had (I thought silently) got up to take a photo.
He did a pretty good musical spoof of the late George Formby singing ‘When I bought myself some computer kit when I started using Windows.’ The anecdotes and jokes are interspersed with songs that included ‘Kill the Dog’ and his finale ‘Let’s Drive the Nazis out of Town,’ again all sung with speed and laced with brilliantly witty lyrics. In a 90-minute show that included an interval the audience lapped up the jokes as the slightly jerky “comic tour de force” as The Guardian put it, was called back at the end for an encore – a pretty good verdict from Axbridge.
Harry Mottram
If you missed the show David is on tour in Somerset through Take Art. Further dates can be found at https://takeart.org/event/flying-solo
He also has his own website at https://www.davideagle.co.uk/
Axbridge News is edited by Harry Mottram and is published online for the interest of residents and himself
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