Review by Steve Bennett

With her endless appeals to ‘give me a cheer’, an ‘ooh’ or an ‘aah’ it’s like panto season, patronising and forced. Add on the phoney laughs at her own material, and the effect is positively grating. Stand-up should seem more natural than this, not forced at you by an overzealous primary school teacher, all too eager to make sure her charges have fun.

Then again, many of her jokes need all the help they can get; sometimes treating the audience like they’ve never seen a black person before. One ‘gag’ is that we might not see her against a black backdrop had she, too, worn black. Very progressive.

Interestingly, she tells us she was brought up in Scunthorpe by her adoptive white family, so you would have thought that this unconventional set-up would have provided plenty to draw upon, should she choose to use her race for material. But alas, no, it’s just the hook for some lame, bland lines about her mum not being Madonna.

It’s a shame, because Carter does have a lively spark to her with some mischievous charm and the confidence only a stage-school education can instil. Glimpses of this are apparent when she tries the occasional first-hand anecdote, but all too often this twinkle is swamped under her cheesy, exaggerated delivery and the weight of too many drab routines.

Review date: 8 May 2007
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett