Review by Steve Bennett

What an unlikely double-bill this is. Currently sharing London’s Leicester Square Theatre with dry, erudite Stewart Lee is Pam Ann, the brash hot mess of an Australian air hostess created by Australian comic Caroline Reid.

Queen Of The Sky is not so much a comedy show as a warm-up for a night in the clubs. She lip-synchs to hi-energy disco hits and gets punters to clamour for vodka shots. Somewhere a Club 18-30 is missing a rep. Because for all she pretends to be a first-class snob who sneers at the scum in economy, her character is less Virgin Upper Class and more charter flight to Magaluf.

The comedy element comes from her belittling putdowns, and from filth. Plenty of filth, as she tells us the state of her pussy and her arsehole from all that screwing she’s doing between snorting coke and getting wasted. She puts the BA in debauched.

Her jokes are low-flying, based on easyJokes about her excesses, the state of people in the front couple of rows, and tired national stereotypes – including doing a comedy Indian voice and saying ‘I can’t understand you’ when encountering a man from the subcontinent. She’s provocatively offensive, without much finesse, and the audience play along with the pantomime of it. A tangential of Oscar Pistorius's crime, gets a shocked gasp, when it’s actually no more than a passing reference.

There are laughs to be had from the sheer brutality of it, and her outrageous bluster, but it gets wearing because the writing’s so week. There’s a sort of stand-up section in the second half when she envisages an Air France Airbus, haughty but so glamorous its emissions are Chanel, arrogantly ignoring air traffic control, which really goes nowhere. And she likes one analogy about the size of her gaping anus that she inadvertently does it twice.

The highlights are film clips when she inserts her brash persona into the rarefied drama of Downton Abbey, raising the eyebrows of the Dowager Countess. But generally it’s just common decency she crashes against.

With her sassy diva-like behaviour, this drag queen trapped in a woman’s body has got a cult gay following, and she hits the target for her party-loving demographic, earning her a standing ovation in some quarters. But she’s the party blower of entertainment: loud, fun – but one note.

Review date: 9 Oct 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Leicester Square Theatre