Review of this year's final

The year has rolled around to the Leicester Square Sketch Off final, this year streamed by NextUp for an online audience as well as the theatre crowd, although it might have been a crowd of drinkers who accidentally found themselves in front of stage, such was the drunk and chatty behaviour of a few would-be personalities.

But enough of them, I just want to acknowledge that the acts were up somewhat up against it.   Colin Hoult’s redoubtable Anna Mann verbally biffed the offenders into shape while charming the pants off the rest of us.  The room lifted and focused every time she took to the stage.

Alice Cockayne offered us two characters, a teeny-tiny voiced alternative milk enthusiast and a vampish, preening Angelina Jolie type,  if AJ was a bag-lady on the bus.  She had an actor’s confidence to take things slowly and make the most of her seven minutes centre stage. It was quietly weird, and watching her change wigs and draw on make-up like a mad woman was a brief insight into character construction. The moody music contributed as much atmosphere as her performance.  Curious rather than funny.   

Next up, Kit Sullivan offered up a clunky robot character, wearing a packing carton and some sticky back plastic in a six-year-old’s version of a robot costume, and sounding much like the said  six-year-old’s version of a robot voice.

This was daft enough but strangely affecting when the robot found out from mission control he’d been sent to earth with a dwindling battery and  no means of returning home to his robot kids. An achievement to still this audience with poignancy, but didn’t forget to amuse.

The Lovely Boys owned their terrible jumpers  and dorkishness then boosted the energy level massively with an on-stage costume transformation into the Nasty Boys, all pelvic thrusts and windmilling gestures.  More than a little reminiscent of Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson’s Dangerous Brothers in terms of presence and fake anarchy, they landed well with the audience. With cracking physical comedy, they didn’t really need a song about wanking, they were doing so well until then.

Klaus Fantastische is Bavaria’s top rated  illusionist, the inept magician whose tricks go wrong, until they don’t. His patter was self-regarding and silly but ultimately endearing and with a couple of cracking magic tricks.

His throwaway observation of ‘If you don’t enjoy it (sketch comedy) it’s on you’ teetered on the edge of arrogance but his  disciplined  performance, illusions and warmth kept him the right side of the line.  More than anyone else, he demonstrated that this Sketch Off show is more about including any act who isn’t straight stand-up, with characters  and  spesh acts welcome too.

Drawing the first half to a close, Dregs (Davina Bentley and Adam Flood) were anything but the bottom of the barrel the name implies and eased themselves into second place in the competition; there wouldn’t been much of an argument had they been first.

Neatly opening and closing their segment with a water-based visual gag and some tongue-in-cheek trigger warnings about assumption of gender and sexuality, they plainly demonstrated the smart end of sketch pairing, to contrast with the buffoonery and contrived clowning that was present for much of the night.

Possibly the shrillest male voice I’ve heard belonged to Darren Thomas, PSHE teacher who was there to talk to the class about issues, sex, alcohol, drugs.  He started at a shriek and just got squawkier, once more calling to mind a level of Rik Mayall’s self-righteous, Young Ones era hysteria.

The sheer brio of his performance has the audience hooked, and necking a pint, a glass of wine and a shot of whisky in quick succession was a guaranteed applause generator, as was his song about spending time besotted with his best friend from school.  I respect his commitment to the drinking gag, but I’m sure he has better stuff to come than messy self-destruction.

Two Mouthed Men brought busking in off the street and beatboxed their way through seven minutes, demonstrating a range of percussive instrument noises and some sound effects which they wrapped around a willing audience-member hostage.  No words were really involved in this, which was pretty far from sketch or comedy, but a skill deployed.

Fabulously costumed Lord Christian Brighty was a complete contrast with his actorly, Simon Callow style of booming delivery.  His high-status posturing and insults flung at the audience were in perfect Shakespearean rhythm and with the authentic whiff of preposterous period comedy as Cupid’s arrows twanged into his rump.

His diction and performance showed how much work and pains had been taken to construct this rich character.  He took third place with this polished performance.

Cow Tools provided the answer to the question on nobody’s lips – ‘What happened to the 118 118 blokes?’ Turns out they bought Hawaiian shirts and then bellowed their way through some sub-Kenny Everett nonsense.

It was noisy and heavy-handed, and as is often the way, it  they seemed to be having way more fun than the audience.  To be fair, there  was laughter in the room for the ‘world’s worst mime’ and ‘the world’s best ventriloquist’ and more, but it was just so witless.  You cannot have it that the funniest thing on stage is the shirts, there’s got to be more to it.

And last up the competition was the modestly named duo, Low Effort Sketches, Andy Bucks and Alice Wickersham. They deservedly romped away with the first prize for their preparedness, writing, smart ideas and ability to improvise when the tech gets in a twist. For all their clever virtues and making it look easy, what rammed home their victory was their screaming murder of a song, which piled on the ridiculousness until it collapsed in a noisy heap.

There had been plenty of shrill and shriek through the evening, but this was controlled, weapons-grade caterwauling that was unfollowable.  Hilarious.  And with the feeling that there would be plenty more in their notebooks to come forward.

A good night, no howling deaths, breakdowns or raspberry blowing clowning; instead a terrific range of performances where the more conservative styles played more strongly.  The people who wrote and edited their way through lockdown overshadowed the ones who depended more on performance.

Review date: 22 Mar 2022
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain
Reviewed at: Leicester Square Theatre