BBC iPlayer review: Rose Matafeo: Horndog
David Farnor | On 24, Feb 2021
Earlier this year, Rose Matafeo enjoyed the lead role in the hilarious and heartwarming comedy Baby Done. Now, BBC Three is giving her the chance to explain why she’ll never be the leading lady in real life, with her 2018 special Horndog streaming on BBC iPlayer.
The show, recorded in London’s West End after its award-winning Fringe run, sees the comic on irrepressible, irresistible form – pitched perfectly somewhere between excitable, intellectual and entirely dysfunctional. Beginning the show with a breakup in her recent past, she launches into a rant about love and passion or, as she terms it, horniness. It’s a relentless, neurotic tumbling out of ideas, one that’s dispatched with a semi-confessional honesty that’s bracingly real. How else to explain the way she admits she loves competence so much that she’d fall for a kidnapper if he was able to drive the boat whisking her away?
But while there’s a casual, rambling air to the hour-long set, make no mistake; every single beat is choreographed to precision, from the way Matafeo shrewdly skewers the line between loving something and being in love with it to her rehearsed reaction to discovering her boyfriend has cheated on her. By the time she’s cueing 90s needle-drops and recalling the early days of the internet, she’s in her element, deftly weaving bizarre outbursts with witty pop culture references – all of which is dispatched with an awareness of her own absurdity. The result is as heartfelt and endearing as it laugh-out-loud funny.
Rose Matafeo: Horndog is available on BBC iPlayer until 5th January 2021