Review by Marissa Burgess

During the opening scene, I breathed a sigh of relief as it looked, for a brief moment, that this was going to be better than last year’s Footlights offering. There were a couple of familiar faces from 2008, but the writing appeared to be an improvement – particularly with the narrator , whose ‘great gag’ catchphrase was designed to be quoted in reviews.

Sadly, such trickery is the only way they are going to achieve a positive quote to use on future publicity, as the remainder of the offering is largely pointless.

In recent years, the Footlights have given us Mark Watson, Tim Key, Tom Basden and Nick Mohammed, but it’s hard to imagine any decent writers coming out of this lot, unless they manage to learn from their errors.

The performances are OK, but it’s only the actor playing the narrator in the first skit who provides any real interest.

The crux of the problem is a rambling structure. For a second year running it seems that there were more important things to be sorted out when the writing for the show needed to be completed. Consequently everyone appears to have thrown in a half-arsed personal project in order to cobble together an hour.

There’s an apparently futile play about halfway through about drug dealers that has neither narrative interest nor is amusing; a farce towards the end is too muddled to follow; skits end without punchlines and the second half of the fairytale from the opening disappointingly fizzles out into nothing.

It’s sad to see such an opportunity wasted, given that the name alone sold out this teatime show. Come on Footlights, pull your bloody socks up.

Review date: 22 Aug 2009
Reviewed by: Marissa Burgess