Booking info

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Eric's Tales of the Sea: A Submariner's Yarn

Performance date - 22/04/10
Performance time - 8pm

Jon Briley at Best Medicine Management Presents a Comedy Night with a Difference!

Winner of the Three Weeks Editor's Award 2009

Former submariner Eric has taken the Edinburgh Fringe by storm for the last two years. Now, he brings his acclaimed one-man show to Birmingham’s Old Joint Stock Pub & Theatre as part of a national tour.

With the aid of astonishing visuals, Eric gives you an insider's view of the mysterious world beneath the waves in a nuclear submarine, and transports you to an underwater existence where edgy camaraderie, black humour, death and destruction are the closest of bedfellows!

"sublime comic timing ... thrilling, witty and inspirational - a one in a million show that I can't recommend highly enough" ***** Three Weeks

"truly excellent" ***** Fringe Review

"breathtaking, poignant, suspenseful, hilarious, enthralling, self-deprecating, never boastful, moving, humbling and comic. Highly recommended" **** The List

"a store of charm as deep as the ocean itself, and some of the best stories you'll hear this year" The Guardian

Taken from a Review in The Times – August 2009






Funny and tender, informative and absorbing, Eric’s Tales of the Sea is the sort of surprise that makes the Edinburgh Fringe special. Subtitled A Submariner’s Yarn, it is a set of stories about underwater life by Eric, who served in the Royal Navy for 17 years before turning stand-up comic.

He tells us of the humiliating initiation rites that the older sailors played on him when he joined at the age of 16. He tells us of the submariner’s privations — sleeping above torpedoes; eating a meal of baked potato and Mars bar. But this is no cynical exposé. When you are all breathing the same canned air, everyone has to get on. Eric’s affectionate, inclusive tales are of friendship and loyalty as much as they are of protocol and pranks.

As befits a naval man, Eric gives us personal information on a need-to-know basis only. The Official Secrets Act stops him from telling us too much about how deep the sub can go or how fast it can travel — although, as he illustrates, you can go to the Royal Navy’s website and find a lot of this stuff out for yourself. But it’s Eric who chooses to tell his stories so tightly and so wittily. It’s Eric who gives us the details of how to pull off an underwater escape, in a life-or-death opening anecdote worthy of an action thriller. And it’s Eric who stubbornly declines to reveal his surname. (I asked him. He won’t tell.) If this is a Boy’s Own story, it is a heroically unheroic one. Swimming by his nuclear sub one day — with fresh water at a premium, that’s how submariners wash themselves — he bumps up against a shark. It takes him two more years to re-enter the water.

He paints a vivid, loving portrait of his best friend, a silver-tongued shipmate who can talk his way out of anything. Anything, that is, until he attempts the world record for escaping from a sub from just beneath the Continental Shelf.

These are matters of life and death, jokingly told. Eric, all beard and curls in a cream jumper is affable but disciplined. Every word is chosen with care. He trusts in his stories, knows not to get in their way. This is well-sustained comedy storytelling, not a laugh riot, which is perfectly suited to any semi-theatrical setting. Endearing but never ingratiating, amusing yet deftly emotional, Eric immerses us in his world.

A quietly wonderful show.