Danny Bhoy Is Taking A Stance Against Data Botherers

Scottish funnyman Danny Bhoy isn't someone you'd usually associate with being a workaholic, but it seems that even in his downtime he can't escape the perils of his chosen vocation.

"It's basically all about over-reliance on security and that constant, endless badgering to get our information."

"You've caught me in my beloved home city of Edinburgh, and it's the Fringe Festival here at the moment so it's been a month of just crazy shows all over the city," the affable comedian explains. "This is only the second time I've ever been in Edinburgh for the Fringe where I haven't been doing a show myself, so it's been a lot of fun. I've seen about 35 shows! The thing about it is you walk around the city and you'll see a mate who says, 'You have to come and see my show!', so you commit to that and then on top of that you go and see some stuff that's out of left field or you've heard other people recommend and it soon builds up. Someone told me the other day that if you watched every single show back to back it would take you two years. That's just at the one festival, that's an insane amount of shows."

Now Bhoy's jetting down to Australia to introduce us to his current show Please Untick This Box, which he fittingly premiered at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival (although he assures that it's changed dramatically in the interim).

"It's basically all about over-reliance on security and that constant, endless badgering to get our information," he tells. "Then I talk off the back of that about how everything's overdone and over packaged, and how we just have too much information — there's too much information out there. Then I started trying to work it into my own performance — my last show was really quite theatrical, so this time around the idea is that I strip it right back and just make it a very raw comedy experience. I used that — at least initially — to get onto the subject matter of how I don't like forced hype or over-packaging or any of these things that try to make us feel that we've had a more developed experience than we actually have.

"There's so much of it around that the challenge for me was to find things that weren't obvious — the things that we don't know are happening. The little things that irritate me that we all go through but never really look at — you just accept it after a while that 'that's the way it is' or 'that's just what I've got to do', like if I buy something now I have to give my email. It's all bullshit, and no one's stopped at any point and said, 'Hang on a minute! Why am I doing this? Do you really need this from me in order for this transaction to happen?' And there's quite a lot of music in the show as well — by which I mean I talk about music a lot, because I think of all the professions that's the one that has more hype and bullshit surrounding it than any other."