Mr Parker’s show opens by declaring itself post-Covid. Lockdowns are over and so what new skills are you taking forward into the new normal? Mr Parker emerges from Alert Level 4 with a reinvigorated Instagram following, due to his new quarantine skills of creating boiled wool figures and sewing them on hats.  He attracts the attention of two museums, keen for cultural relevance in documenting the pandemic. And this show is about How He Felt.

Mr Parker, as a comedy writer, is both delightfully pointless and absolutely necessary. As a performer, he is perfectly in command of his script, his improvisation and his multi-media presentation. He wants us to feel his sense of fun and his charm.

Mr Chris Parker sees his new show as somewhat transitional, moving from niche cultural reference and into National Treasure. He is right to command such a place, and we look forward to him being on the new $200 note. But the way he sees himself is not how the audience experiences him.

What we see and hear is much darker. On the large screen, behind him, we see his hand-held needles and the felting wool he is pricking relentlessly, crafting furiously, while he talks of childhood trauma and bullying. He is basically making the audience watch him stab a figurine, hundreds of times, while he talks about his difficult family relationships and being a gay child. It’s very funny but it’s also full of violence and shame. If the ‘Mrs Bates’ in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho used crochet hooks instead of knives, Mr Parker would be her.

If TVNZ ever revived Play School, Mr Parker would be an ideal host. Sweet and smiley for the kids, promoting the virtues of crafting hobbies, while being borderline inappropriate, winking from behind the screen for the career executives on maternity leave and the gay dads all stuck at home, waiting for his daily episode to kickstart Gin o’clock.

Mr Parker wants to be all comfy and ditzy, and an audience favourite. Of course, he is. But despite his best efforts, and these efforts are very, very good, he comes across as altogether much more wicked, damaged and surreal. It is for these qualities, and everything else weird and wonderful about him, that he will indeed become a National Treasure.

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