Preview: Lee Kyle at Arts Centre Washington

Lee Kyle, Burning This Place to the Ground

Arts Centre Washington

Friday 7^th July 2017

During his decade-long run as a professional wrestler, Lee Kyle battled alongside WWE superstars like Daniel Bryan, Neville, Road Dogg and D-Lo Brown. Before that, he spent much of the late nineties playing Mel B in an all male Spice Girls tribute act.

His life has been a never ending quest to not have a real job.

Now he's rolling with the punches on the comedy circuit, as his debut stand up tour comes to Arts Centre Washington on 7th July.

Lee Kyle

"The show is called Burning This Place to the Ground and it's basically about making grand plans that never come to fruition," Lee, 37, from South Shields, tells us.

"But it’s way sillier than that sounds, I can proudly say that people will leave the show not having learned anything, except for a pretty excellent fact about Butch Dingle from Emmerdale.”

In 2016 Lee saw his first book, Spandex Ballet, about his time as a wrestler released and become a surprise hit.

"It's not something I expected" Lee says “I wrote the book more as an accompaniment to another stand up show I was writing but it ended up being the top selling wrestling book on Amazon UK for a number of weeks and, gratifyingly, has proven popular among comedy fans too. It was outselling the likes of James Corden for a short time and, although that couldn’t last, it was pleasing and ridiculous to find myself in Amazon’s top ten comedy biographies for a short while.”

Last year also saw Lee compose two different hour long comedy shows, including this one which he took to the Edinburgh fringe, as well as his first ever kids comedy tour show, an interesting and unusual career diversion which has seen him work with Jedward and appear on CBBC.

He appeared on Ross Noble’s ‘History of Geordie Comedy’ on Radio 4 and has a video on youtube with over 3 million views, with many comments from Americans who don’t understand his accent.

His podcast ‘Which is the Best?’ has proven popular with listeners and has translated into a succesful live show, it is, oddly, surprisingly popular in the Pacific island nation of Palau.  It features Lee and his support act for much of this tour, Sammy Dobson (From BBCs Boy Meets Girl and the feature film I, Daniel Blake).

Tickets:

Lee Kyle, Burning This Place to the Ground comes to Arts Centre Washington on Friday 7 July, 7.30pm.  Tickets are £8 and are available from www.artscentrewashington.co.ukor by calling 0191 561 3455.