It must be quite intimating for So You Think You’re Funny finalists to look at the roll call of previous winners. Can they join the likes of Peter Kay, Tommy Tiernan, Lee Mack and Dylan Moran? Not that you could see any sign of nerves on the face of first entrant Elliot Steel who strutted on after compere Zoe Lyons' lively warm-up and delivered a bullet-proof 8 minutes about being a 17-year-old sarf Londoner and doing everything adults do, but illegally. It feels OK giving away that gag as Steel is going to have to change it anyway as he turned 18 this week. He’s a really confident, streetwise rising star clearly going places and was placed second tonight. It was only a small surprise to discover after the competition that his father is veteran Mark Steel.
Second up on the Gilded Balloon stage was Mark Daniels, who got plenty of mileage out of his camp voice and his problems of being mistaken for a woman on the telephone. He had a nice riff on the banality of his name, and was a confident, impressive performer. He just needs some sharper, more distinctive material and he could easily have a career in stand-up.
Jim Smith walked onstage to a huge roar and it seemed as if he has brought his entire hometown in Perthshire with him. Smith, a farmer by trade, was tall and imposing and certainly able to tell a story. The only trouble was that the judges were mainly English and he used so many Scottish words when discussing his life and his time at agricultural college that he could have done with subtitles. It was still clear that he was a natural conversationalist. If there had been a vote in the room he might well have been placed. He might even have won.
Benji Waterstones was the obligatory oddball in the line-up, a trainee psychiatrist who gets so lonely living on his own that he calls the helplines on the back of cereal packets. There was some entry level whimsy here and a clever running gag about Tesco Clubcard points but not enough to make a real impact on the scoreboard. Though he may have suffered from being the fourth act in a row who was young and male. Without getting too PC about it, there was a noticeable lack of women in the final this year.
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