Mike hopes for a night of comedy loveliness to warm his heart on a dark winter's evening...
The Wilmington Arms is a great venue to be sold out. Dark but intimate, with scattered and cluttered benches, it's like being sat in a school assembly singing silly songs on a wet dinner time. Indeed, the Really Lovely Comedy Show is like a ray of sunshine on a bitterly cold night. MC Ben Van Der Velde is our guide, with a stunningly quick wit and a knack for drawing out both the good and the evil from the gleeful audience.
A great and varied range of acts starts with the Chortle Awards 'Best Newcomer 2010' Joe Lycett. A big, cuddly, softly spoken chap with a heart of gold, a politely middle class demeanour and an attitude as curiously androgynous as his look, all making for a rather counterintuitively broad appeal. It's like the very essence of the event was named in his honour.
Andrew McWhirter has a bit more of a struggle, with almost Nixonian sweat levels due to the bright lights and low ceiling. His is a good act with some acute observations, but it goes to show the difference between a welcome reception and a ropey one can be in as little as a bit of calm crowd interaction.
Third is this year's Amused Moose winner Rob Beckett, the best of the bunch. He's funny before he even speaks, with densely wooded yellow hair and a positively regal set of gnashers (he gets the aesthetic jibes out early so I thought I'd follow suit.) Short, sharp jokes peppered with effortless verbal punctuation go to make an uninterrupted string of zing. Deserves to do very well indeed.
Fourth is Alison Bice: a rare combination of smiley bright-eyed deadpan in a consistent start-stop format. Her fortuity of being impossibly cute allows her to get away with some unexpectedly dark material, which in turn allows her to get away with some impossibly cute material.
Our headliners are sketch quartet Idiots of Ants, doing well to maintain any semblance of a fourth wall in such a short room. But sketch comedy is so often at its funniest when the fourth wall is broken, and Idiots of Ants break it with style, be it deliberately or otherwise. They're a sprightly bunch, slowly and gradually paced with stark and overtly histrionic delivery. Their sketches are nuggets of simple satire rolled out into fat burgers of surreal fuzziness. What they lack in density of dialogue they more than make up for in reassuringly visible comradery and hard work. It's not difficult to see why they're already beginning to conquer TV.
The night lives up to its name. Five acts and not a fleck of bitterness or scorn among them, which is no mean feat in British comedy. So delicious it just has to be bad for you.
The Really Lovely Comedy Show takes place on the second Wednesday of the month.
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