Gig review by Steve Bennett at Leicester Comedy Festival

As the host of hit auction show Storage Hunters, Sean Kelly is known for his great salesmanship in pushing goods of wildly variable quality. It’s easy to say the same about his stand-up.

His crowd work is a delight, forming an easy back-and-forth with his audience – which tonight ranged from a teenage arable farmer to a drum-and-bass producer to a man who sells wheels for supermarket trolleys,. His jaunty banter creates a spirit of fun, which, in turn delights him further.

When it comes to material, though, it’s a different kettle of fish. He admits to being a little rusty and takes to the Leicester stage with a couple of pages of notes, which he quickly loses faith in.

A lot of what he does have is predictable. As a Californian, he rags on Britain’s weather, how Americans think the British are all Downton Abbey and how he thought ‘Leicester’ was pronounced.

Stereotypes abound as he mocks the Germans as humourless and evil or parodies the Chinese accent, despite acknowledging it might be seen as racist. His fellow Americans get it in the neck, too, for being, of course, dumb. It’s all low-hanging fruit, relatively crowd-pleasing but none-too-interesting.

Meanwhile, some of the more personal tales don’t really seem like routines. He grumbles about Gumtree buyers or tells us that he once went to a waterpark without his costume, so took to the rides in his underwear. But there’s little flourish in the telling, no great hooks or surprises.

A few offer more promise, even if they remain relatively straightforward: from having sex in a cable car to the best of the lot, humiliation in his well-to-do gated community is (he’s made a lot of dough from auctions, apparently, taking healthy commissions from both buyers and sellers). 

There are several such tidbits for fans of Storage Hunters, without being too alienating for anyone else. Kelly’s in a difficult situation as any UK fans he has will come from the show’s success on the Dave channel, but  he surely wants establish himself as a comedian beyond that. On tonight’s evidence, the lock to that greater appeal has yet to be smashed open, even if he is an infectiously upbeat performer.

Review date: 10 Feb 2017
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett