Tim Harding reviews Leicester Square Theatre's annual competition

The finals of Sketch Off! – the UK’s premier competition for sketch and character comedy – makes for a lovely occasion to see a whole line-up’s worth of sketch.  And despite the way that the genre is usually deployed as a kind of palate cleanser on a mixed bill, a full evening of it goes down very smoothly indeed.

This is partly thanks to the skills of returning host Sam Nicoresti, bringing balance with some warming stand-up and glamour with striking scarlet circle dress, complete with epaulettes that provided a slightly militaristic feel. I’ll try and get better at fashion terminology for next year.

In the unforgiving opening slot, Ollie West and Christiaan Hendriksen were performing as Big Boys, kicking things off with that classic visual combo of very large bishop and quite small monk, riffing some sacred-sounding Latin gobbledegook in a call-and-response game with the audience. Their suggestive sacrament and visual gags made for a fun aperitif, but there was a detectable shortage of material in this seven minute slot.

Jim Midge, the bolshy geology educator with a head full of talcum powder and a heart full of longing for Janine the checkout girl, played a similar set to the one that won him third place at last year’s Musical Comedy Awards, and here netted himself the silver medal. 

That Luke Nixon took his influences from Tim Key in creating this character remains plain to see, but he fills Midge with enough richness and inhabits the persona so totally that he stands out a mile, even in a field crowded with character acts. If the rumours are true that he’s working this act up into a full hour, that’s exciting news.

Roger Prick, the drag king persona of Hannah Whyte, is a touring author of boneheaded erotica now trying clumsily to address his old-school sexism. This archetype of puffed up machismo is the kind of character that Adam Riches churns out in his sleep, and has many antecedents in the drag king realm as well, but Whyte’s application of him as an author of erotica is potentially a fruitful one.

In this competition, the results were uneven. Some of the readings of erotic excerpts went down a storm, but Whyte’s performance couldn’t find much beyond the generic voice, and there was an over-reliance on comic misspeakings: ‘Private cock; I mean private dick! I mean private detective!’ – things of that nature.

Next, Livvie Newman, Cecilia Orr and Sarah Alli comprised Sardines, the first group doing good old-fashioned sketches. And while you’d hope there’s always a place in this competition for ideas like ‘What if Bob Dylan was your therapist’, Sardines’ well-meaning compositions lacked verve. These are three talented performers in want of material that will take them outside their comfort zone of broad impressions and period drama parodies.

Nikola McMurtrie, the Scottish performer who made an impression on me as a guest on Hot Rubber last year, once again brought a maniacal level of ambition to her brief slot. 

What started as a Q&A with Thomas The Tank Engine quickly incorporated dance, poetry, heavy use of multimedia, audience interaction and guests, as McMurtrie burned ideas with exhilarating speed. 

Perhaps too much speed, as this injection of jet fuel left the audience struggling to orient themselves slightly. She took a well-deserved third-place prize, and I remain excited to see what she can do with a bigger time budget.

Finally for the first half, Behemoth (Mo Gascoigne, Heidi Parsons and Tim Carlier) was another deceptively challenging prospect. The premises for their vignettes are not altogether unusual, but the strange thing is the way they blur into one another like a dream. 

An incongruous character will wander into a scenario like a CEO into a corn maze and will gradually overwhelm the sketch until the corn maze is a boardroom and all the maze’s visitors are businessmen. It’s an interesting, slightly Pythonesque approach to live sketch, even if the frequent unexpected zagging makes it a little difficult to fully get your arms around. Colour me intrigued.

Starting Act Two with a bang, Basil Crumbwick is a man in a dressing gown, a front-facing rucksack and a huge goggle-eyed false head. 

Sam Eley’s creation is equal parts Frank Sidebottom and Frankie Monroe, with joke-writing skills that transcend his influences. Maniacally screaming his zingy one-liners about stealing dogs from somewhere inside his cavernous head, he makes a hell of an impression and demonstrates the power of properly composed jokes delivered from a distinctive point of view. 

He won first place pretty handily and I’m already looking forward to seeing him headline next year. That big papier mache head is the chrysalis for something very special.

Unfairly suffering from having to follow a clear standout, Rachel Baker’s character Gwen is a Birmingham-based Avon saleslady and ‘fun-loving hun’, recently returned to the streets after a period of incarceration for selling illegal bacon-and-egg vapes. 

She certainly put a lot of energy into her performance, with a gregarious presence and a full song-and-dance climax.

 Ultimately though, the jokes weren’t clearing the same bar set by Crumbwick, and the character slotted too neatly into the ranks of the many brassy, slightly unhinged working-class ladies that have been created by young character comedians in recent years.

Scottish siblings Kirsty and Jamie Cooke were probably the most successful pure sketch act of the night as K&J Club, with a collection of inspired scenarios (a holographic exhibit at an off-brand Robbie Burns museum in Stevenage) and some tight writing (the gossiping typists rampantly misusing common idioms). 

The performances were solid as well, having been honed in their successful improv group Hoof. All that was missing from this act was a strong sense of their respective personas; not an easy thing to establish when you’re playing multiple characters, but essential for the audience to establish a rewarding through line. And they REALLY need a better name.

Christian Dart had a good reception as Detective Gumshoe, a spoof of a noir-style detective indulging in a little high-pressure crowd work with a ‘dame’ from the audience. 

He gave a good showing with a relatively tight, joke-filled set, and might have had a shot at the podium on a night of less consistent quality. Spoof detectives really are a dime a dozen, though – he needed a few more wrinkles in his persona to take it to the next level.

Hudson Hughes is back again, solo this time, after reaching the finals in a double act with Eva Wallis last year. His set was one long sketch, performed as a local mayor who is secretly a karate-based superhero. Like Detective Gumshoe, it’s another well-written set delivered by a character that didn’t quite feel natural or lived-in. As with Hughes, it felt like he had grabbed the most easily accessible phenotype moments before coming on stage.

In contrast, the final set, from Jess Carrivick as celebrated jazz singer Cassandra Della Treebourne, was a case of the exact opposite – a unique and indelibly personal character without the writing to put it over the finish line. 

Half Katharine Hepburn and half Janis Joplin, she trades mostly in innuendos and a catchphrase ('nawty nawty nawty’) that was funny the first time but yielded decreasing dividends. 

Like a lot of the acts tonight, it’s not a bad start at all, just in need of some fine-tuning and extra sophistication. In many ways, exactly where you’d want young sketch writers to be at this stage in their careers.

• All pictures © Steve Ullathorne

Review date: 8 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Leicester Square Theatre