Story Club

21 January 2015 | 3:48 pm | Guy Davis

"It’s a charming and engaging format for our current Age Of Disclosure."

We’re all storytellers in our own ways – it’s just that some of us sometimes have better tales to share or have a knack for the whole raconteur thing: there are people out there who can make their 20-minute train trip home from work into an epic to rival The Iliad or transform a youthful pub crawl into a comedy of errors.

And storytelling remains one of the most resonant forms of communication and connection there is; if it doesn’t unite or enlighten us, it can at the very least provide us with a laugh or a cry. Is it any wonder then that the new ABC2 series Story Club, a televised spin-off of the long-running theatrical event of the same name, should work as effectively as it does?

Don’t be mistaken, Story Club’s aims are modest – some articulate so-and-so settles into a chair and regales you with an anecdote. There’s no dramatisation, no re-enactment, only the storyteller recounting an incident or recalling a chapter of their lives. However, the show, co-created by writer-comedians Zoe Norton Lodge and Ben Jenkins (of The Chaser’s Media Circus/The Hamster Wheel fame; both of whom settle into the big chair with the “awkwardly large book” to spin their own yarns), works a treat on that level.

Story Club has chosen its storytellers well – there’s something of a sameness of tone (wry, bemused, self-deprecating), but it’s a tone we respond to. And the departures from that mode are also funny, lively and just provocative enough. It’s a charming and engaging format for our current Age Of Disclosure.