Review by Steve Bennett

A jolly, chatty and upbeat stand-up,  still-newish act  Stephens offers ten minutes or so of amiable good company.

Delivered with an easy good nature the material, however, tends towards the smileworthy rather than the noteworthy.

Her tales of the grottiness of her particular north London enclave, Catholic  guilt and the like are set in an undistinguished comedy landscape, with little material that scores of other, more established, comics couldn’t do equally well.

That said, she does recognise the importance of a dropping good punchlines into the otherwise lightly observational  chit-chat. There’s maybe half a dozen good lines in her routine (even if the childish idea of inserting the letter I in ‘to let’ signs isn’t one of them), but they’re just that bit too far between to build up a good head of comedic steam.

Those best lines hint that Stephens has got more to offer – but at the moment they remain just hints, leaving her not as a bad act, but just a resolutely ‘OK’ one

Review date: 1 Feb 2005
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett