Review of the climax of this year's new act competition

There surely can’t have been any votes this week with more potential to mould the future of the world than the audience poll to crown the champion of the Beat The Frog new act hunt at Manchester’s Frog & Bucket comedy club.

And, like the piddling popularity contest the other side of the pond, this looked very much like a two-horse race once we knew who we dealing with.

Energy was relatively muted for the first half of the ‘World Series’ final, though not for the want of trying by gregarious compere Hayley Ellis, with her chipper banter and relatable anecdotes, especially on the humiliation of having a contraceptive coil fitted. 

First into this environment came Alfie Dundas, who claims the attitude of a middle-aged man but the face of a small child, and has a good line, allegedly from a review, playing into that. However, focussing almost all of his short set on what he looks like, from body hair to celebrity doppelgängers, has diminishing returns. 

He’s a confident performer with a middle-class brogue we’re hardwired to associate with competence (despite much evidence from the political world to the contrary), and nicely incorporated a callback to some of Ellis’s crowd work. But the horizons of his material are definitely limited, producing solid but unexciting material.

As if to show how generic the material, Bilal Rachid also opened with jokes about what he looked like and his body hair, falling in line with at least one Middle Eastern stereotype. However, he’s more keen to subvert some of those clichés.

He’s a strong and efficient joke writer, encapsulating amusing ideas in pithy, memorable phrases, with his description of Sports Direct, his former employer, certain to stick in the mind.  He may not be the warmest of performers, but the gag rate and the blunt use of language are definitely in his favour.

Alex Redman has a peculiar, nervous energy that’s appealingly quirky and a good fit for her equally off-kilter material. Yet it didn’t quite connect with the audience, who seemed unsure what to make of this eccentric Hartlepudlian as she shared her odd obsessions and demonstrated how great she thinks she’d be as a background extra on a film set.

It’s a hard sell, being more about weird energy than material, and on the evidence of tonight’s gig, Redman hasn’t yet nailed how to make that work, but she’s chasing, kooky company.

Laid-back Lithuanian Donatas Kveselys put in a strong showing, teasing us for knowing nothing of his homeland, and demonstrating an ability to riff in the moment when it became apparent he was too tall for the camera relaying his performance onto a big screen.

His unusual physicality is definitely a selling point, and has plenty of unique gags about his freakishly long, loose-skinned arms – while planting the idea of how much of this he shares with his twin sister in our imaginations. Distinctive, too, is his routine debunking the psychic connection such siblings should have. Slightly inscrutable, with a great sense of timing and a mischievously self-deprecating sense of humour, he’s likely to be one to watch. 

With blue hair and head-to-toe in leopard print, Maxine Wade certainly cuts a distinctive figure on stage, part Bet Lynch, part Just Stop Oil protester by her own description. Indeed much of her set can be surmised as ‘what am I like?!’, from those bold fashion choices to the lack of decorum in her day job as a nurse.

Like many in the medical profession, she has a dark sense of humour and isn’t coy when talking about topics such as porn – which an amusing notion of why Yorkshire accents like hers are rarely heard in that genre. She’s full of vim and energy, if not, perhaps, discipline, with a set that pinballs around both in material and style – a scattergun approach that never quite gets a bullseye.

Opening a livelier second half, Tabish Akbar has some fun first-hand stories, from growing up hustling to recollections of a date which means he’ll never see Malcolm X in the same way again – and nor will you after hearing this funny routine. The anecdotes are peppered with gags, as are more fanciful segments, such as his reinvention of chess to feature brown pieces, true to his Asian background.

By strange coincidence, Ciara O’Connor also had a gag about chess, though entirely different. However it was just an aside in a set that largely offers a wry commentary about being transsexual,  playful about the reaction that information gets, both personally and in wider contexts such as sport. 

She plays her comedy dumbish, though there’s hidden depths to what she’s addressing, particularly in the nuances of her relationship with her boyfriend who she’s known since attending Catholic school together.

When Murph took to the stage the energy rose palpably, an adverb he offers a delightfully silly take on. He has the audience rapt enough to indulge a long build-up to a single pun and it not  feel too much like self-indulgence and getting far more out of a potato-based routine than you might have thought possible.

He’s good at misdirection as well as extrapolation, with a nice gag about mental health that draws on toxic masculinity. And revealing that he got a tattoo of the Frog & Bucket’s logo after winning his Beat The Frog heat was a coup-de-theatre than hammered home his advantage.

‘Well, he’s going to win,’ deadpanned Shannon Griffiths, who had to follow, ‘so what’s the fucking point?’ It was a perfectly judged line that not only acknowledged how well Murph had gone down, but instantly established her dour, can’t-be-arsed persona.

That coldly indifferent attitude, back with some inventive writing, elevate what could be a pedestrian observation – that pregnancy could be seen as flaunting the fact you’ve had sex, for example –into something distinctively witty. Likewise, her  brutal, blunt and dismissive opinions are made palatable by her darkly charming writing. 

She may have been right about Murph winning, but she took the audience-voted silver as well as the panel prize chosen by industry judges, myself included.

It’s a tough act to follow, but Sharifa Butterfly – her real name – still made quite the impression. Striking in sharply tailored yellow suit, and cropped red-dyed hair, she has the sort of look that prompts strangers to tell her, unsolicited, how they like strong, black women like her. The twist is that she’s no such thing. Her personality’s much more hesitant and unsure, which provides a fine comic juxtaposition. 

She has decent material too, the best woman speech as if generated by AI is wonderfully heavy-handed, and her take on the 72 virgins supposedly awaiting Muslim martyrs starts off in familiar territory, but she soon makes it her own, with the contrast between her slightly awkwardness and the sexual content nicely played.

She’s not the only comic on tonight’s line-up we’ll be hearing more from…

Review date: 6 Nov 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Manchester Frog And Bucket