Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People DVD

Those of you with excellent (and slightly obsessive) memories will recall that I bought some comedy DVDs in December and planned to review them all.  The first review, of Josie Long’s Trying is Good, was posted on the 27th December, and now here’s the second.  Yes, it’s really taken me 6 weeks to get around to doing the next one.

Nine Lessons and Carols is a Christmas show for atheists\rationalists that was organised by Robin Ince, in 2008.  I was gutted that I couldn’t go and see it at the time (bloody London!), so god bless the wonderful Go Faster Stripe for recording and releasing it.  The show is like a royal variety performance, but with intelligent people.  There are singers, comedians and scientists all performing, and it’s an eclectic and entertaining bill.

Part of the reason that it’s taken me so long to watch is because I started watching it in dribs and drabs, one performance at a time.  This was probably a mistake, and I should have just set aside the 2 hours it needed.  That said, it’s a very handy DVD to have if you have a spare 5 or 10 minutes to kill and want to watch something funny or informative.   It actually took me so long to watch that the 2009 version of the show was televised on BBC4 in the mean time.

I won’t go through the full list of performers, but they include: Richard Dawkins, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, Andrew Collins, Josie Long, Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre.  Basically it’s loads of my favourite people.  The show is interspersed with talking heads interviews with some of the people who appeared on the live show, but not on the DVD version. These include; Jarvis Cocker, Dara O’Briain and Chris Addison.

The DVD extras are an extended version of the interviews (50 minutes), a backstage segment with Robin Ince, and a special easter egg dance routine.  A special thanks should go out to Chris Evans at GoFasterStripe.com for continuing to independently make such quality comedy DVDs.  You should all support their endeavours.

You can buy the DVD for a very reasonable £10 by clicking here.