Lockdown is over, the boy is back in town: after two years of global/domestic chaos, Ivo blasts through his most urgent concerns of the early 2020s, plus a few from the late 1990s, in a critically acclaimed show (“mastering his craft with motormouthed finesse…if self-deprecation were a sport, Graham would have a gold medal round his neck”: The Times), beautifully filmed in London at the end of his “My Future, My Clutter” UK tour, with a freshly ironed shirt, a handful of schoolboy stories and a really quite outlandish amount of lamps on the stage.
It’s all here, if by “all” you mean go karting regulations, Radio One text-ins, Eagles documentaries, and KFC’s social media presence. Or, indeed, nuclear fallout, Peppa Pig World, Daniel Craig announcing the weekend, and the politics of your favourite malt loaf. How about wordles in nightclubs, risottos on Zoom, masks on stag dos, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s red card against Newcastle in 1998? Ivo is unpacking the whole feelings box of his life for you here, and he’s hopeful and confident that you’ll enjoy it. Or, to put it more succinctly: ladies and gentlemen, the special.
There are – not to make this sound at all like a boast, as it really isn’t – quite a lot of clips of my “work” on YouTube. However, though all are welcome to go down the tedious rabbit hole of awkward interviews, weird bespoke sets (“size doesn’t matter” has travelled much further than the four gilded walls I expected it to stay in) and, in quite a few shameful cases, repetitions of the same material at different gigs – these are some I would prioritise as “noteworthy” (in the loosest sense of the word) examples of said work.
Tussling with a front-row legend called George (who’s come to several more gigs since, usually bearing scandi-themed gifts) about a recent holiday. There’s a hell of a lot of crowdwork on social media these days, but I pride myself, if nothing else, on my videos being the longest.
One of the various bits of breathless sports punditry I recorded for Ian Stone’s “The Football’s On”: a thrillingly al fresco venture outside of my vlog-averse comfort zone.
The Lock Inn pub quiz: the one even vaguely professional thing I did on any sort of regular basis during the first lockdown, and a dubious audition tape for my ambition of hosting quizzes with higher production values in the future. This episode with Conaty, Key and a superbly belligerent Robins was the high point.
My extremely stressful night in Hull, April 2021, which has arguably done more for my career than anything else before or since.