Review by Jason Stone

Pauline Goldsmith might have scraped two stars for her show were it not for her complicity in one of the most appallingly inappropriate performances you could imagine.

For as a warm-up she has signed up a 12-year-old boy called Murdo. His five-minute slot was almost wholly made up of jokes about paedophilia. To describe it as excruciating doesn't do justice to an extraordinarily uncomfortable experience. A child of his age should not even be able to understand this material, and the decision to have him recite it on stage was woeful.

Ricky, the second warm-up act was nervous and so self-deprecating that he appeared to destroy his own confidence. His set might not have been quite so embarrassing if it wasn't for the fact that Murdo was still in the room as Ricky's material was entirely unacceptable for a child's ears... even one as precocious as the boy who'd handed him the microphone.

At least Goldsmith had the good sense to shoo Murdo away when she took the stage but only because he was due somewhere else so there was no way of being certain that she regarded material about kissing the perineum; greying pubic hair and drooping vaginas as inappropriate for a child.

Aside from her unhealthy preoccupation with her genitalia's lost lustre, Goldsmith offered an insight into the life of a fortysomething woman with Irish heritage growing up in the West of Scotland. Well, 'insight' isn't quite the right word unless you take 'insight' to mean 'predictable trawl through the depressingly familiar'. She's a confident performer compared with the dismally nervous Ricky but her material suggests that she's one of those women who made the mistake of thinking she should give stand-up a go because she can make friends and colleagues laugh.

There were only about 12 of us watching in the audience, but that didn't stop Goldsmith from expressing disbelief when no-one put their hand up when she asked if any of us were from Ireland. At a bigger venue this might have constituted some Kind Of Surprise but among the small group of us enduring this show, it must have been expected.

Even if Goldsmith has been brilliant, it's hard to believe that this show could have recovered from the horror of its opening ten minutes. Everyone involved needs to have a long think about the wisdom of allowing a 12-year -ld boy to parrot inappropriate material and then complete his turn by cuddling into the lap of a male audience member and offering sexual favours for sweets. Shameful.

Review date: 19 Aug 2010
Reviewed by: Jason Stone