Austin Lowe looks like he should be an excellent comedian. He talks the talk and walks the walk with a professionalism unusual for his 22 years, bounding around confidently like the love child of Tigger and Sonic the Hedgehog and delivering high-speed anecdotes with pitch perfect timing.

He knows his lovingly-crafted routine inside out and clearly relishes performing it - but there is something strangely mannered about him, as though he swotted too hard at comedy school and inadvertently lost his personality in the process.

Like an actor playing a stand-up, he has picked up various characteristics from other comics and so sounds puzzlingly familiar.

Most frequently, he adopts the observational rambling of Eddie Izzard, right down to the elaborate mime and habit of playing out scenarios as several different characters. It is inevitable, of course, that comics will be influenced by the style of others, but even Lowe’s material sounds like Izzard’s cast-offs.

One sketch, in which he imagines the difficulties of ‘happy slapping’ in the days before mobile phones, is uncannily similar to one where Izzard suggests Jesus and his disciples goofing around for the Last Supper painting. Lowe even uses Izzard’s James Mason voice when he’s talking in character.

The overall effect, whether intentional or not, is distracting and frustrating. Observations that appear more his own are fairly uninspired – he vents his indignation over the false claims of advertising, even going so far as to phone Lynx customer services to complain that the legendary ‘Lynx effect’appears to be an unfounded claim.

Reviewed by: Nione Meakin