Stevie Martin reviews the 5th Channel 4 Comedy Showcase featuring the best up-and-coming talent on the UK circuit, including Joe Lycett, Pat Cahill and Fumbi.
The Comedy Store always draws a good crowd and last night's Channel 4 Showcase was no different. The quick-fire sets came from those who truly deserve the much bandied about phrase "up and comer"- these are the faces who've either started, or are about to start, popping up on your tellybox, last night given ten minutes to impress and told to make it topical. MC'ed by Mock The Week's Simon Evans on crowd pleasing form, his is a fairly vanilla set with the odd edgy bit thrown in for good, shocking measure; but never threatening to cause an actual stir. The night, however, is all about the showcase. Tourists and comedy-goers blend with Channel 4 scouts and TV producers while Evans mines as much "TV Producers Probably Do Cocaine" lines as possible before making way for the first of seven sets, led by Joe Lycett.
You can't talk about Lycett without mentioning the words "camp", "charming" and "likeable" but I'll have a bash at it. His blend of observation, verbalised musings and anecdotes are delivered in an articulate yet animated sing-song voice making him endlessly watchable and, er, you can't help liking him a lot. His secret weapon lies in his ability to lift a sentence from the mundane to the hilarious with a bit of bizarre emphasis or unusual delivery. He's also quite camp, very charming and likeable.
Similarly likeable, but in a different sense, is Fumbi the smiley Nigerian stand-up with a penchant for appearing predictable before whipping the laughter rug away at the last minute. Yes the Olympics are on the agenda and yes he does pull out the classic "black men can't swim" line, but there's a lot of unexpected twists in his material.
Next up, Bethany Black launches into a series of fairly amusing tales punctuated by her constant reminders that she's a lesbian. It's her schtick and she manages to shock some of the more fainthearted with her sexual escapades, but more often than not the stories themselves aren't particularly strong. She meets an unattractive woman after a gig who wants to have sex with her and, impressions of the woman aside, there's nowhere for her to go.
After the interval Pat Cahill smashes it, as Pat Cahill is wont to do. Self-fashioned microphone stand and double denim all present, his easy style and tendency to launch into wonderfully articulate flights of fancy even carries him through the (shock horror) repetition of an Olympic-related joke made earlier by Fumbi. While many comics would subsequently lose the room, Cahill neatly counters it with some of the strongest material of the night. The skit on Olympic chants results in a round of applause and a man in front of me saying "this guy's incredible". Let's hope he's a TV talent scout.
There's a brief break as Evans gets an Elvis impersonator called Miguel up on stage to rapturous, vaguely drunken, applause before Rob Beckett strolls on and smashes it even more than Cahill. Granted, we're all on a high and the wine's been flowing at a concerning level but everything Beckett says is greeted with hysteria, making it difficult to properly critique the set. He does the loveable working-class rogue thing well, throwing in curveball one-liners of surprising whimsy amid straightforward anecdotes and packaging it up in an effortless conversational style.
Joe Wells has big shoes to fill and he doesn't quite manage it, perhaps down to nothing but nerves. The material is solid and his writing is sharp, but Wells seems strangely unconvinced by his own jokes; there's a tentativeness preventing him from commanding the stage as he should. The reaction of the audience is raucous but this is due to inebriation; were it not for the wine, he might have struggled.
Chris McCausland, who immediately follows with the final set of the night, also has a patchy ten minutes. A regular at Jongleurs and The Comedy Store, his set isn't as tight as usual, with his more controversial material not quite hitting the mark. He accidentally backs himself into a corner with an ill thought-out Paralympics gag that is taken the wrong way and has to waste valuable joke time digging himself out of a hole. Misfires aside, the laughs come when he's firing off practiced jokes he's clearly comfortable with.
Overall a fairly strong night from an array of rising talent thanks to Channel 4. Watch out for these names on your screens over the next year or so.
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