Brian Butterfield’s failed tycoon is the comedy comeback of the year

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It’s a simple-enough premise for a comedy character: the would-be tycoon who is actually a hopeless businessman. And yet the gentle genius that Peter Serafinowicz brought to this portly, rheumy, moustached middle-aged entrepreneur when he played him in his BBC sketch show in 2007 clicks just as well in 2024. It’s one of the least-expected comebacks of the past year. It’s also the funniest.
Butterfield tells us that each business failure teaches you an invaluable lesson. Which means he has learnt well over a thousand invaluable lessons. The joy of this spoof success seminar, Call of Now, is that it is a consistently inventive failure forum. Clips at the start remind the faithful and induct the newbies into Butterfield’s endless portfolio of fiascos. After that, there’s an onstage heart attack — don’t worry, he brings his defibrillator with him wherever he goes — that leads into a glorious sequence of lampoons of business talk, bad inventions, bad memory tricks and mindfulness mantras. His voice-activated computer assistant Bri-AI-an is on hand to mishear almost everything.
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Serafinowicz and his co-writers have structured cannily their silly symposium. They light some fuses in the first half that only detonate in the second. And while Butterfield’s interactions with his audience are reliably awkward, the longueurs are part of the joke. If the show might click best in smaller rooms it’s too generous with its jokes to ever stall for long.
Some of those jokes might be obvious in the wrong hands. Thankfully, Serafinowicz is a comic actor (Shaun of the Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy, the online “Sassy Trump” videos) who lends humanity as well as hilarity to even the daftest conceit.
It’s easy to mock jargon and self-delusion. Serafinowicz brings sincerity and innocence to a businessman oddly detached from any interest in profit. He brings gravitas to Butterfield’s lugubrious incompetence. Things keep going wrong — what kind of business guru locks himself out of his own show as he looks for the loo? — but he keeps buggering on. So he is both preposterous and relatable. “I promise to never give up,” he vows at the end, in the brief gap between a crisis of confidence and an empowering karaoke finale. I laughed and I laughed and — how did he do that? — felt tender and hopeful too.★★★★☆Touring to June 25, brianbutterfield.co.uk
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