Robin Ince's Book Club is always hilarious

Latitude’s tag-line is ‘more than just a music festival’, so it makes sense that donkey sex should have cropped up twice over the course of the festival.  The first time was during Robin Ince’s Book Club: The Disgusting World of Sex in the Literary Arena.  Comedian Robin Ince hosts his Book Club about four times a day at Latitude, each with a different theme and a different, but always hilarious, carousel of acts who Ince has found and enjoyed, mixed in with some less than serious book readings.  As Ince tried to read, straight-faced, a porn story about a woman having sex with a donkey and actor Kevin Eldon portrayed the disgust he felt, and felt we should feel, next to him, the only possible result was hilarity and genius beyond measure.  The second bout of donkey sex came from the poet Jackie Kay, whose charming and sweet disposition and her adorable Scottish lilt belies her occasionally biological and often funny poetry.

Donkey sex (let me reassure you that that is the last time you’ll read that phrase in this article) was not the only foray Kevin Eldon took onto the Literary Arena stage.  Playing the character of crap poet Paul Hamilton, Eldon recited his brilliantly God-awful verse to a captive audience in fits of laughter.  Eldon cleverly mocks those poets who just take everything too seriously and, I think, Roger Lloyd-Pack (yes… Trigger…) could have used a bit of that advice in his recitation of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.  He took one of the 20th century’s greatest poems, imbued it with far too much seriousness when

TS Eliot is distinctly unimpressed

it wasn’t required, and added a cello part.  It was as poor an interpretation as it sounds, but at least he gave some sound advice to the uninitiated: don’t try to understand it all, just let it wash over you.  Also appearing during the course of one of Robin Ince's Book Clubs were comedy team Pappy's Fun Club whose sketches were both brilliant and bizarre - I, for one, will not easily forget the sight of grown men talking to each other through the penis because in the 17th century people 'didn't know they could hear through their ears'.

Poetry has long been one of Latitude’s strong points, with the Poetry Arena expanding exponentially in size, crowd and quality over the past four years.  A Latitude and national favourite is Simon Armitage, who delivered some wonderfully astute poems in his uniquely Northern way.  It was a far cry from his Thursday night offering with his band The Scaremongers, who sounded like a shoddy Smiths from Huddersfield with a - sorry, Simon - tone deaf singer and lack of Johnny Marr-like ingenuity.

Among other poetic highlights were Aisle16 - a collective including the fantastic Luke Wright who effectively runs the Poetry Arena, and the brilliant Tim Clare who shocked the tzatziki out of the audience by belting out his poem ‘Mrs. Fuck’ at six o’clock on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  Dockers MC whose rap-like verse is both cutting and laugh-out-loud funny performed a couple of times to great acclaim.  MC Angel also pulled out some good performances, including an unforgettable ‘MC-off’ with actor Keith Allen (yes… Lily’s dad…) to close the arena on Sunday.  Jessica Delfino was also excellent, playing ukulele and rape whistle in a selection of funny songs, whilst musician Mik Artistik was weirdly, scarily and hilariously brilliant too.

Adam Hills wreaks havoc and destruction on 'giant gay pink poodles'

In the Comedy Arena, Tim Vine reeled out innumerable disgustingly awful one-liners that had the audience groaning at his genius.  He closed his show with two clever skits involving a pen behind the ear and a series of ventriloquism dolls all performing ventriloquism.  Adam Hills battled the trashy music coming from White Lies to perform an incredible set in which he failed to tell any jokes, instead choosing to make children mount giant pink foam poodles, crowd-surf racing said poodles, and then crowd-surfing himself.  He should’ve been a rock star.

UCL’s own Dead Man in a Box (whose name is a reference to our beloved Jeremy Bentham) performed an imaginative improv murder mystery, in which they solved the dastardly case (chosen by the audience) of the Church Graveyard Chainsaw Murder of Vanilla Ice.  Cue spooky Irish grave diggers and a Vanilla Ice who sounds more like Arnold from Diff’rent Strokes than anything else, and you can see how great a show it was.  At the other end of the day the Cabaret Arena was lit up by the fabulous drag queen Jonny Woo who compered The Whoopee Club.  The supremely talented Woo was as fantastically entertaining as the acts she introduced, which included girls in rabbit suits killing each other then doing a zombie-style rendition of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, synchronised swimmers on stage in no suits at all, and a mesmerising hula hoop act.

Having seen all these acts, it was still clear that we had barely scratched the surface of what Latitude had to offer.  It’s true what they say - ‘it’s more than just a music festival’.