Review by Steve Bennett

Though an affable and engaging presenter, Jim Bowes lacks a strong direction in a show too short on strong punchlines to stand apart.

In part, this is loosely based around a contrived comic quest, with Bowes challenged to appear at all 12 of Edinburgh’s festivals, his progress dutifully charted on pointless histograms.

Bowes certainly likes his PowerPoint: having spent three years away from comedy to work as an IT project manager for a bank, he’s absorbed that curse of corporate meetings and can’t help but have a slide behind him throughout, sometimes reducing him to reading the bullet points we can all read for ourselves. This technological crutch is mostly a distraction, far from an essential aid to the show.

Alongside this, he talks about obsession from Roland Rat to He-Man, Vanilla Ice to collecting mugs, Lionel Richie to sending letters of complaint. A cynic might think these are just things has a scrap of material on, rather than obsessions, for there’s no real substance to any of the routines that goes beyond, say, explaining why Skeletor was way cooler than He-Man.

It seems as if Bowes has examined how comedy shows tick, right down to leaving ’em with a moral (‘embrace your obssessions’), but dodged the lesson about having a real passion and something to say – or at least lots of gags.

He is a confident, eloquent speaker able to maintain the interest in even the thinnest of material, and proves decent company over the hour. But ultimately there’s just too little here to obsess about.

Review date: 29 Aug 2010
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett