Student comedy awards 2005

Glasgow heat

Economics student Idil Sukan has become the first woman to make the final of the Chortle Student Comedy Award.

The second-year Edinburgh University undergraduate, who is half-Turkish, half-Spanish, started performing at The Stand’s new act night Red Raw just under a year ago.

She triumphed at the last regional heat, held in Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde on Tuesday night.

 With her bonkers delivery style and mixed bag of topics, from dragons to toilet seats, there’s more than a hint of the Eddie Izzard about her. The routine’s flimsy hold on reality is too fragile to sustain much of the whimsy, but when it does work it’s delightfully silly.

She now goes on to perform at the final on London’s Tattershall Castle, a moored paddle steamer opposite the London Eye, on April 25 alongside

Other ‘wildcard’ finalists chosen from across all the national heats – in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol and Coventry - will be announced early next week.

The other competitors in the Scottish heat were:

Tony Dunn: A chatty performer who seems to have sacrificed gags for ease of manner. His first punchline is an age coming, which does little to engage the audience, and much that follows is equally long-winded. There’s a nice ideas at the heart of his main routines about Neds and funeral directors, but the jokes need to be coaxed out a lot more to have real impact.

Olly Bennett: Another slow burner, and when the laughs do come many of them are based on getting the audience to join in with punchlines to obviously familiar jokes. Although he acknowledges that fact, he doesn’t bring enough of his own spin to bear on the material. A couple of smarter, more distinctive lines elsewhere in the very loosely political set show he is capable of raising his game – but he’s not yet consistently hitting these.

Austin Low: The most crowd-pleasing act of the night, his loud, fast, no-nonsense delivery bulldozes the material through with single-minded determination. His scope isn’t particularly ambitious – my, isn’t Pop Idol’s Michelle McManus fat, a gag half-inched from Peter Kay about a ‘VD’ player and an extended routine about masturbation. It’s this last one that is probably his trademark routine, aggressively told and grand in scope, taking the familiar set-up into new realms.

Andy Vaughan: Another act with an accomplished manner, but observational material that seemed all-too familiar. The fact that he’s applying a comedy formula mean his gags will never be distinctive – or, worse, identical to other comics’ work – however enjoyable his company.

Steve Bennett
March 31, 2005