Review: Adrian Bliss: Inside Everyone

If you're on the right side of TikTok, you've probably scrolled into Adrian Bliss. His deadpan videos are comedic imagining of events that may have happened just off the pages of the history books: a soldier realising his mistake inside the Trojan Horse, John the Baptist dealing with an urgent sinner, the reality of Picasso’s wife’s facial features. Inside Everyone treads a similar path. We meet an intrepid atom (Bliss in full zorbing get-up), at the beginning of the universe, who finds themself witnessing another side of human history.

Like a one-man Horrible Histories, Bliss is Pandora desperately trying to ignore her box, Caesar coming up with a new salad idea, Van Gogh’s ear out on his own and living his best life. Fans will be serviced; Bliss’s trademark awkwardness and faux confusion evoke his most-watched videos. But his grasp of satire and biting wit that underscores each scene will win over any newcomers.

Over millenia, Bliss is everywhere and everyone, and so, the show’s abiding message tells us, are we. There is a poignancy in this, a near-earnestness that can be seen in much of Bliss’s work. There’s enough to undercut it, though, a primordial soup of fourth-wall breaking, tongue in cheekiness and unrepentant daftness.