TV review by Jay Richardson

Sky must be pleased with the results of their latest round of comedy short films, unveiled at the Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny this weekend.

Though each Irish-themed offering was shot in a day, there's not a duffer among the six, with almost all the comics featured drawing directly on dubious episodes from their lives.

At the brief Q & A convened after the screening, Jason Byrne ventured freely his sordid past as an inadvertent rug thief, while Alison Spittle left the indelible image of a discarded sex doll floating off down a river bearing a huge, felt-tip scrawled erection, her over-enthusiastic contribution to a hen do.

We also learned that Al Porter can't ride a bike, despite penning himself a cycling scene. And that somewhere out there is a make-up artist who has affixed a concealing sock to Seann Walsh's penis. Reports of whether it was a child's sock or football stocking varied.

Here's our verdict on the films, which were released on Sky Arts on demand last night:

Jason Byrne's: Subtitled The Rug, this features the animated stand-up entertainingly shifting through the sort of gurning, cartoonish persona he tends to adopt on stage. Initially, he's a seething, barely suppressed volcano of middle-class domestic rage, a pernickety, buttoned-up librarian, screaming into his swear pillow at the local news headlines, the unconcealed contempt and animosity of his wife (a game Amy Huberman matching him for simmering physical repression) reflecting a marriage grown stale.

But then a transaction error at the local carpet shop leads to them accidentally stealing a rug, an act of transgression that re-ignites the flame of their sexual ardour, nicely conveyed with a series of escalating visual gags. The use of the Beastie Boys' Sabotage as soundtrack is a bit of an obvious shortcut but the creeping guilt of the couple's crime is capably built up and there's solid support from Foil, Arms and Hog's Sean Flanagan as an oblivious shop assistant.

Diet of Worms: For those still lamenting BBC Four's decision not to order more episodes of The Walshes from this the Dublin sketch outfit, they here deliver another engaging burst of family quirkiness and squabbling, as the five play a once famous group of quintuplets, The Kavanaghs, reunited for a television interview with Eamonn Holmes.

Niall Gaffney is the brother acting as catalyst for the reunion, his moral flakiness slowly infecting and uniting his resistant siblings in a desperate effort to eke out their 15 minutes of fame a little longer. As ever with The Worms, the characters might be broad and on this occasion, somewhat exaggerated of eyebrow. But the writing is nuanced, with the deflation of Phillipa Dunne's LA diva Lenore particularly cutting.

Al Porter: As a calling card for his talent for UK broadcasters, Porter's film is at once an (almost literally) naked acknowledgement of his burning desire for fame, open mockery of that Ambition and a slightly neutered, mainstream distillation of his more waspish stage act.

Nevertheless, it's charming, with the comic playing The Karaoke King, a low-rent nightclub singer encouraged in his struggling career by his cheerleader Nana (a wonderful Pauline McLynn) and one-legged drag queen co-star Les (Garry Mountaine). Featuring a lovely bit of business in which Porter talks himself out of a semi-lucrative booking with his mendacious agent on the phone, tying himself in knots in a manner reminiscent of Morecambe and Wise, the film cannily foregrounds Porter's old school, rather cheesy showbiz pizazz but hints at a darker sense of humour, his idiot character's ignorance of his hero Michael Barrymore's fate transmitted in Nana and Les's tacit silence on the subject.

Katherine Ryan: Again, drawing heavily on autobiography, Ryan's culture-clash vignette enlivens the quiet tradition of an Irish church gathering with North American brashness, the booming Dropkick Murphys soundtrack providing appropriate backing to her blowing through a quiet family gathering like a force of nature.

Essentially playing herself, with a significant level of celebrity and her young daughter in tow, the Irish-Canadian comic rocks up late to her nephew's christening in rural Ireland with the child's mother (played with natural chemistry by Ryan's sister Kerrie), stirring up dormant emotions in all assembled. Directed by Katy Brand, it's the most impressionistic and snapshot-ty of the films, capturing Ryan's larger-than-life persona with rapid edits and enjoyably pacy, bickering dialogue between the sisters.

Alison Spittle: As the least established of the acts, Spittle has the most to gain from her film's exposure and has seized the opportunity impressively. Making a virtue of her setting, the cramped confines of a nightclub toilet, her short principally focuses on the intimate conversations between Spittle and Andrea Farrell as hen do participants trying to keep the night flying from inside a cubicle, even as the rest of their party have meltdowns outside.

As with Spittle's stand-up about smuggling booze in handbags, there's a delightfully naturalistic, roguish quality to the lines, with laughs emerging organically and at a steady pace, generally resisting the urge to ramp up the drunken wildness for broad humour, even when there's a few surprising set-pieces.

Seann Walsh: As with Ryan's, Walsh's film is an affectionate nod to his Irish heritage but also the latest instalment in a nascent acting career preoccupied with his love/hate relationship with alcohol. Playing a washed-up actor, Robin, trapped by his fame as the face and voice of a popular crisps commercial, his attempts to detox in Bray are torpedoed when he bumps into his cousin, played by an effusively upbeat Fred Cooke.

Karl Spain, who co-wrote Porter's short, is just one of the locals who sees Robin's new health regime for the flimsy bullshit it is and what follows is an amusing, episodic slide off the wagon. Whether Walsh has any range as an actor is open to debate but there's no denying that he's a hugely convincing piss artist and remorseful victim of self-inflicted excess.

Review date: 5 Jun 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett