Review of the showcase final in Leeds

It’s an impossible task, of course, finding the next Sean Lock. But while he is inimitable, kudos to Channel 4 for keeping his spirit alive with their award highlighting comedians who strive to be off-the-wall but maintain a broad appeal.

Ten such acts assembled in a hip warehouse-style venue in Leeds last night , in a gig rather awkwardly MCed by Joe Wilkinson – who may be many things, but ‘natural host’ is not one of them. Indeed, he joked about sucking the energy out of the room, even before launching into a lengthy and vivid discussion of his haemorrhoids.

Opening act Marty Gleeson was probably the most Lock-like of all the finalists, with peculiar lines that are essentially non-sequiturs yet with some peculiar logic of their own, whether it be notes of caution on tattoos or trying to explain the concept of doughnuts to an uncomprehending mind.

Dryly mischievous, she indulges in audience participation that amusingly goes bit too far, while her trademark routine has her beating out a rhythm on her traditional Irish bodhrán while delivering a message from the future. It certainly makes her memorable.

County Durham’s Elaine Robertson also creates lasting images, thanks to her extravagant act-out of a smear taste – a routine she phrases as a defiant ‘fuck you’ to misogynist complaints that all female comedians talk about is their vaginas. 

However, the setting isn’t really the point – it’s her naivety creating humiliation in the most absurd, embarrassing way. She commits to the bit, while her gentle North-East accent makes the anecdote sound almost whimsical.

Pravanya Pillay’s unworldliness also led to embarrassment, falling victim to a scammer who she really ought to have seen through. In an incident she can’t let go, her polite desire not to upset the caller, even if he was a crook, overwhelming all alarm bells.  This story is preceded by a bittier section, with shorter, usually surreal, observations thrown into the audience, all with a winsome charm. 

Speaking of which, Bristol’s Millie Malone has the sort of well-spoken, butter-wouldn’t-melt, middle-class girlishness that is at delightful odds with the edgier material. 

Very Sarah Silverman-ish in that stealthy delivery of dark, often filthy gags, she got a great reaction from the crowd, especially when pandering to the Channel 4 organisers by talking about their output. Namely, the documentary My Massive Cock. Her brand of naughty punchlines will go far.

Jin Hao Li had the audience on side immediately, getting a decent laugh just from saying: ‘I was walking through the forest’ with a slightly off-kilter cadence, just the start of the peculiar phrasing that defines his style giving him, quite literally, a unique voice. 

Some of his material is utterly stupid – a section about spellings especially – while others are delightfully surreal, such as imagining himself as a plastic bag in a supermarket. And plugging into a childlike​ imagination as to why sleep is represented by zzzzzs hits both bases. His stand-up may be way off-the-wall, but it elicited the best audience response so far, in what was a competitive field.

Wilkinson opened the second half with little more than two sentences, one of which was ‘why did they send me out again?’, non-existent compering which didn’t give  Shalaka Kurup a fair set-up. Still, she got the crowd settled with sardonic material about her Indian background and feeling British after 12 years here.

Her segments had relatively conventional starting points for stand-up, such as talking about getting a Brazilian wax and her smear-test gag, though she gives things a spin of her own, before ending with a pointed dismissal of Lord Of The Rings and a charmingly silly train joke that undermined the appealing air of superiority she gives off.

Former Paralympian Ricky Balshaw talks about his cerebral palsy with the sort of jokes that elicit sharp intakes of breath as well as sometimes uncomfortable laughs. ‘Let’s see how far we can push this’ he teases. 

Not all this – including some wanking gags –is especially sophisticated, but he scores a lot better with an outrageous anecdote that starts with home-made ketamine and unspools as wildly as you expect, before undercutting it all with a perfect punchline.

We return to Brazilians for Leah Davis, who has a story about getting the waxing done on the cheap, thanks to Wowcher – a routine written with an elegance that you might not expect from such base subject matter, as she reveals each new red flag about the experience.

Elsewhere, she talks about being virtually the only black girl in the small Wiltshire town where she grew up, and how that gave her the latitude for mischievous untruths – a habit she hasn’t entirely grown out of, as evidenced by this classy routine.

Marjolean Robertson paints a vivid picture of her Shetland childhood, forced to confront the harshness of life young thanks to being brought up on a farm, while drawing on a few sinister, Wicker Man-style, references to outsiders for a dark comic atmosphere. 

Her storytelling style benefits a longer form than the few minutes that a competition allows, but the vignettes here remain artfully drawn, funny in the detail and evocative in her distinctive burr. And in a routine about her new life away from the islands, she offers a PSA about condoms that could prove invaluable…

Finally Harriet Dyer – introducing herself as ‘face of a vegan, morals of a sausage’ – offered snapshots from a peculiar life and a tendency to be, in her own words ‘gormless’. 

Luckily, she absolutely owns every bizarre moment in her chaotic, babbling retelling of each incident, an apparently unfiltered download of things as they occur to her, but which actually form a coherent set as she expands her peculiar reality into even more off-the-wall surrealism, such as imagining using a hedgehog as a calling card. Really.

For all the restless quirkiness, Dyer holds the audience completely. The fact you don’t ever quite know where that overactive, unconventional mind is going next all part of the ride, and she went down a storm with both the crowd and the judges who crowned her winner – based, apparently, not just on tonight, but that must have had a huge influence.

We can only think that Sean Lock would have approved of such an eccentric oddball carrying his torch.

Review date: 23 Oct 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett