Review by Steve Bennett

At her best, she combines sharp observation with overblown exasperations, delivered with a vortex of grumpy anger that pulls us all in, backed up with sharp and funny gags.

But increasingly she appears to have lost her way, delivering rambling, directionless sets. She seems to be racked with nervous hesitancy about approaching flimsy, pedestrian material, covering tired subjects blandly.

The trials of traveling by EasyJet or her mother’s ineptitude with technology are described accurately, but with such minimal comic embellishment she might as well be filing a straightforward report. And haven’t we got over the novelty of predictive text not knowing the swear words yet?

‘Why do you never see any lesbian air hostesses?’ she ponders, to which the obvious answer is ‘How can you tell?’ But she needs the stereotype of butch bull dykes to make her broad-brush comments work.

But her main failing is that she’s too long-winded. She mentions the film United 93, gives a summary of its plot, a few production notes about how it was cast, a little review of how mesmerised she was by it, then repeats a lot of the dialogue – and still no joke. Then she places herself in the situation for a weak exchange about her sexuality, and an easy callback to the butch hostesses. That was a lot of setup for not much payoff.

Sometimes she gets laughs just from being dismissive: ‘Ugg Boots. Why?’ It’s the sort of moody attitude that might pass for wit on a 100 Greatest Fashion Disasters type TV show, but she is capable of so much more.

Cameron has a nicely intolerant attitude, and an appealing naturalness to her delivery, and when there is a gag to back it up, it works very well. But that’s becoming an increasingly infrequent occurrence.

Review date: 1 Sep 2008
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett