Brighton Fringe review by Steve Bennett

Once upon a time, when the circuit was smaller, comics who had a serviceable five to seven minutes might have got slot on various professional bills until the demands of a paying crowd forced them to work out what they were doing, or they vanished into the ether as the bookings dried up. These days, the drive to ‘make it’ amid a dearth of decent open-spot slots but a hell of a lot of terrible ones, means they are sharing fringe bills with 25 minutes apiece well before they are ready.

And so we present Leona Irvine and Matthew Finlayson, who took a 24-hour round trip on the Megabus from Glasgow to Brighton to present an underwhelming free show, which about a third of the already meagre audience walked out of. No one, act or punter, can be satisfied with that.

Both comics suffer the curse of new acts – although it’s concerning to see online reviews of Irvine going back five years, as she still seems pretty unpolished. Neither are actively bad, but neither have anything worthy of attention, either, which is very exposed when they are speaking for more than a few minutes. They plod through their ‘let me tell you a bit about myself...’ conversations, with occasional witty aside, but making no impact on the people they are unloading on to.

Irvine, from Ballymoney, Northern Ireland, talks about her invented Russian cellmate lover, and a mother who said things that were inappropriate, but conveniently not quite offensive enough to repeat for cheap laughs here. She’s distracted by the texting, chatty girls in the room like the rest of us are, but not experienced enough to address it.

Native Glaswegian Findlayson, has the accent, patter and rhythms of an early Billy Connolly, forever on the verge of cracking up at his own jokes – and that certainly makes him an appealing speaker. But his stream-of-consciousness anecdotes are too long on set-ups, and only occasionally deliver a decent punchline, despite a diverse range of topics from dropping acid to keeping greyhounds. It means the goodwill he naturally engenders gradually saps away and the whole hour dissolves into a puff of pointlessness.

Review date: 10 May 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton The Quadrant