Review by Steve Bennett

Nick Hall’s three-year stint with sketch and musical comedy quartet The Three Englishmen has certainly given him the performance chops for a lively stand-up debut. He can inject even the most mundane of stories with vigour and pace.

And that’s a curse as well as a blessing.

There’s quite a lot of showmanship, and often not much show. One routine has him buying some corn on the cob, then realising he doesn’t like corn on the cob, so taking the corn off the cob. I wish there was more to it than that, but it’s told with the passion and importance of a dispatch from a war zone.

He admits that as a suburban boy from a loving family, he might not have the edge, wittily describing middle-class existence as life with all the fun removed. They used to go on caravan holidays, for Pete’s sake – although at least that has provided the adult him with some comic fodder, as he recalls the indignity of having to empty a chemical toilet, or his anger at the arrhythmic rain keeping him up at night.

He grew up in Watford, which he repeatedly mentions to try to give the hour some sense of place, although it could be any provincial town with occasional brushes with celebrity and a fiercely parochial local neewspapers. He had some dull jobs, working in Homebase, the Virgin Megastore and Boots, where again he describes in breathless detail chasing a shoplifter through the Harlequin Centre as if a Hollywood action blockbuster, but with a muted payoff.

Within this hour that covers the entire span of his life there’s a strong 20 minutes fighting to get out. There’s a bundle of great one-liners at the start, the intriguing idea that he’s fabricated a girlfriend, and the sometimes odd behaviour of parents: his mother appearing racist on a reality show, his permanently unadventurous dad having a narrow world view.

Hall has all the comedy techniques at his disposal, and it’s hard not to be won over by his commitment and timing, even if he hasn’t yet enough substance. That’s evidenced by a convoluted callback in which he ticks back almost every bit he previously mentioned. However, i’s not a climax that arises naturally from the stories, but an artificial construct, substituting jokes for a device, and it seems terribly contrived.

He’s an engaging performer, but hopefully he won’t rest on that alone.

Review date: 21 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett