Review by Steve Bennett

Talk about a car-crash. This is a pile-up of ‘Blues Brothers finale’ proportions.

Clare Harrison appears in skintight leather catsuit and a massive peroxide wig as Cindy The WAG, a ditzy Essex girl. Her clueless character is either the most brilliantly convincing bit of acting ever, or absolutely nothing of a stretch. I know which my money’s on, as she babbles away randomly, giggling and flapping when the technology fails.

In the flesh, she’s got a gushy, unselfconscious charm, even though the material’s ropey: a routine obsessed with bodily failings, peppered with pub-gags, which are deftly incorporated, if hardly original.

But we only get a few minutes of her endearingly mad, rough-diamond, self. The rest of the show comprises videos of comically low production values, watched by many in the audience through their fingers as they cover their face in utter disbelief.

The below-the-belt fixation continues on screen: farting, pubic wigs, gussets, dogging, arseholes and vaginas all substitute for punchlines. She has a politician character called Baroness Labia, while another creation called Period Woman is a red-clad superheroine doing a fitness video, for some reason.

Others are even weirder. A man who looks like he’s ‘browned up’ with dig shit smeared on his face and doing a Jimmy Savile impersonation tuns out to be David Dickinson. A woman who looks a bit like the Queen prances around a back garden in a surgical gown revealing her backside with a tea towel shoved in it. Characterisation is generally some comedy teeth, an ill-fitting wig and a strained accent.

There’s no reason this has to fail as spectacularly as it does – Vic & Bob have have made a career on such oddness – but this is crippled by not just a dearth of jokes, but a fatal lack of focus.

Her videos are unwatchably amateur – full of brutal jump cuts, even mid sentence; visual non-sequiturs flashed up subliminally; fumbled lines left in scenes shot with dingy lighting and poor sound. These are only technical details, but a similarly slipshod approach applies to the writing. It’s often impossible to fathom what’s going on until someone gets their merkin out; and that’s the gag.

Making an audience watch something they could easily click past on YouTube demands a bit more rigour than a winningly shambolic live performance, and Harrison might be best advised to work on her promising and likeable stage persona, rather than inflicting her shoddy videos on the world.

Click here to watch some of the hundreds she’d made; laugh at how amateurish they are – then ask yourself honestly if you’d really like to endure an hour of these.

Review date: 18 May 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton Caroline of Brunswick