Student comedy awards 2006

Heat 5: Manchester

Another night, another city – and this time it’s the student comics of Manchester, and a few other cities of England’s North, to show what they’ve got.

First onto the stage at the XS Malarkey club was Dan Thornton, a conversational-style comedian talking about whatever catches his eye: for example, a bizarre story about the feline slimmer of the year from the unlikely-sounding Your Cat magazine. He’s at ease on stage, but the problem is, he doesn’t add all that much to an already funny story, so the effect is rather like a radio DJ reading out items from the day’s tabloids – entertaining enough, but unspectacular.  Other formulaic jokes along the lines of ‘what if we had ended up with a black pope – who rapped’ achieve much the same effect.

Lack of jokes is not a problem for Merlin Blencowe. This dry, sardonic stand-up is relentless in his barrage of often-punny one-liners. So unremitting is the style that he even developed the unlikely catchphrase: ‘That’s a thinking man’s joke – this is neither the time or the place’ to accompany his more convoluted wordplay. Even more anecdotal stories, such as his being intimidated by teenagers on the bus, are admirably heavy on the punchlines. Not every gag worked by any means, but he’s certainly got many of the right attributes to be a comic. Which, after growing up with a name like Merlin (real, apparently) is pretty much your destiny… you don’t get many an insurance assessors named after quasi-mythical characters.

Tim Cant has obviously listening to far too much Andrew Lawrence,  the stand-up newcomer who won the BBC New Comedy competition last year. But he has to hope his audience haven’t been doing the same, for his act is a none-too-subtle rip-off of Lawrence’s tortured style. The raspy voice, the staccato delivery, the strumming of the guitar as he describes scenes of abject depravity, they’re all there. So close is the act that while Lawrence has a routine about defiling the furniture display in John Lewis, Cant does one set in DFS. It takes more than changing a trademark to show comic invention.

Dubliner Killian Monson makes clear from the start he’s not one of those cheerful Riverdancing blarney-filled Irishmen. As if we needed telling from the brooding presence of this self-confessed ex-Goth. He plays up his moroseness, berating those who urge him to smile and recounting tales of his misery, such as being mugged or burgled, with a downbeat laugh-at-my-woe stance. It’s a low-key approach, vaguely reminiscent of Boothby Graffoe at his most laid back,  that works very effectively, even if the set went a little off the boil in the last couple of minutes.

Robbie Dale didn’t even get to the boil. Not for lack of confidence, but because of a lack of  focus on the humour in his ideas. So while the wide-ranging set, covering everything from own-brand electricals to Nazis, set up promising premises for gags, they rarely arrived, leaving the audience struggling to determine the point of what he was on about. Still, he’s got a nice line about putting narcotics in cosmetics…

Peter Thompson covered lots of bases in his set: starting with some quirky quickies, moving on to a more extended offbeat routine about Isambard Kingdom Brunel and ending with a mini-rock opera dedicated to Planet Of The Apes. The routine, however,  suffers from diminishing returns: starting strongly with decent,  fast-paced gags, the Brunel bit losing its way a bit and the song proving a rather aimless waste of time. A bit too much of a mixed bag, at the moment, but not without potential.

Tony Richardson, pictured, was the contestant who most had the air of an established comic, and even though he fumbled an early punchline and muddled the words ‘resignation’ and ‘rejection’ in a routine about applying to manage football clubs, his natural abilities hold the audience. He’s a skilful storyteller, adept at creating comic images in the audience’s minds and exuding the confidence that he knows what he’s doing. He was a finalist in last year’s competition – and on the strength of tonight’s performance got through again this time around.

As much as Richardson showed how to hold a room, Vincent Peters showed how not too. In a nervy performance by a clearly inexperienced act,  his set jumped around confusingly almost as much as he did. He made much of his low self-esteem issues, and just too often this jumbled mess seemed more therapy than stand-up. At this stage, he’s just out of his depth on stage – in stark contrast to the slick competitors this talent hunt has been attracting.

Steve Bennett
February 28, 2006