Review by Steve Bennett

If you're complaining that the Fringe has got too predictable and safe, then you're not looking hard enough. Fans of Reeves and Mortimer should be queuing around the block to see the brilliantly eccentric Bob Blackman Appreciation Society, yet there are barely a dozen of us here.

Not that such a low turnout is going to subdue host Jonny 'Showaddywaddy' Sorrow, a proud Black Country man in late middle-age with showbiz in his soul, even if it hasn't quite worked out for him. His motto is  'Where there is darkness, let there be light... entertainment', delivered with a megawatt smile he pastes on as he tries to forget where his career’s wound up.

Then the bitterness comes out  'I could have been the next Freddie Parrot-face Davis,' he laments, blaming the onset of alternative comedy that ruined his career prospects. 'And you don't even know who he is!'

In fact, with his desperate, unstoppable, need to entertain, Sorrow is more like how Bruce Forsyth might have ended up had circumstances been different. And alternative comedy? These two epitomise it at its shambolic, off-the-wall and insanely hilarious best - at least sometimes, as unpredictably is another watchword.

The other man in this wonderfully oddball duo is a mysterious figure performs in deadpan beneath a balaclava, or occasionally a rubber pig's mask, label still prominently attached, a very contrasting style to Sorrow’s intensity.

The show is a twisted take on old-school variety. Bob Blackman was a real entertainer who made his living smashing himself on the head with a tin tray. Sorrow wants to recapture that age where you didn't need jokes, just enthusiasm and a gimmick. Tap-dancing fleas, an ill-fated ventriloquist act with a strangely spooky old dummy, 'the man with no act'... thet all line up on this stage with changeovers covered by blasts of theme tunes and assorted clips from TV in the golden age of cheese, the Seventies, to set the mood.

The put-on desperation is hilarious, the vigour with which Sorrow performs as if his life depends it, knowing all-too-well that he's not in fashion makes him an excellent comic creation. A victim to changing tastes, he astutely cries: 'Young comedians, this is your Christmas future.’

But a more apt quote for this show, and Sorrow especially, is a clip from New Faces or Opportunity Knocks that plays out a couple of times: 'If he doesn't become a big star, there ain’t no justice.'

This pacy and utterly bonkers show is - as they say in Sorrow’s neck of the woods – ‘bostin’.

Review date: 22 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett