Last year I reviewed the BBC Radio New Comedy Award Final from a seat in the Comedy Store stalls. While winner Steve Bugeja was excellent there seemed to be a disparity between what people in the Store saw and what audiences at home who were voting thought. So this year I’m live-reviewing the all-male line-up from the comfort of my office and listening to the broadcast during Steve Wright's Radio 2 afternoon show just like you normal people out there.
One thing I can’t help mentioning upfront is that if my social media pages are any guide Lost Voice Guy, alias Lee Ridley, must be the ante-post favourite (this bit is being posted before the competition starts). It may just be my timeline, but I’ve seen more appeals for people to vote for him on Twitter and Facebook than I’ve seen for any of the others. It may not affect the result but then maybe if it does that’s appropriate – Ridley has cerebral palsy and cannot talk. He delivers his jokes via a text-to-speech app on his iPad so he certainly harnesses new technology in his act more than any of the others…
First onstage to big cheers was Hari Sriskantha from Barnet, who kicked off with a riff on the many different ways his name is pronounced, followed by the perils of being 26 – half man, half-child and finding himself suddenly ticking youngsters off and getting depressed when they don’t know what a Nokia is. This was basic stuff but it won the crowd over and led to more interesting material about wanting immortality.
Sriskantha was hugely confident, hugely slick, with a pacey delivery, though occasional moments where he lowered his voice sounded eerily like Mark Watson. Some clever gags about physics, Genghis Khan and wondering why publishers put dust jackets on the sides of books which never attract dust revealed a welcome offbeat, slightly geeky sensibility. First off is always tough, but this was a great start - as long as listeners could still remember his act when voting opened an hour later.
Second up was Thomas Ward. I’ve seen him before but this sounded like new material - his opening routine imagining Jools Holland and Patrick Kielty chatting together was equal parts hilarious and bizarre. He was amazingly assured, improvising with the audience when he spotted a man who was maybe too relaxed in the crowd. Ward was also not scared to vary the pace and cleverly worked in a pre-planned carpet ad spoof, complete with sound effects.
There was certainly plenty of originality here, leading the crowd in one direction before taking sharp verbal detours. Ward was particularly good on familiar terrain such as pubs and dates – on meeting his ex-girlfriend in Wetherspoons. “Beautiful smile. Loads of gaps. More gaps than teeth.” It certainly went down well in the Store and was going to be a tough act to beat.
Lost Voice Guy from Newcastle was third up. In some ways his technique of using an iPad to tell his jokes was both a plus and a minus. The material was very funny, but listening on the radio it was not clear how much it was tightly scripted and maybe even pre-recorded and how much was being made up on the spot. But it certainly prompted plenty of laughs in the venue. Enough, indeed, for him to be crowned winner, picking up £1000 and a rosy comedy future.
He was happy to find the funny side of his condition: “I’m here to tick some boxes and make you feel awkward,” he joked. A highlight was his witty observation on the variable meanings of the word “special” and he was not backwards in finding the humour in coming from Newcastle and yet sounding like Stephen Fry thanks to his iPad.
Tom Little from Cumbria was a quirky act and initially seemed too quirky. His opening wordplay-inspired quip about a static caravan looked like it was - no pun intended – going nowhere – but then he pulled out a canny punchline. It was a style that he repeated again, before moving on to an offbeat gag about Richard Branson bemoaning the fact that he can’t bring a cat back to life.
Little’s variations on the old riddle “what’s black and white and red all over?” got laughs and he threw in a cheesy but effective “knock knock” gag, but somehow he lacked the knockout punch. A problem may have been that his intentionally nervy delivery meant that the audience was never quite at ease. A worthy finalist, but not a contender for winner.
Sutton storyteller Amir Khoshokhan was another inventive, relaxed performer. He quickly got the audience’s sympathy by saying that he had just split with his girlfriend before doing a quick verbal rug-pull. There was a blokey feel to his delivery which initially had a hint of Micky Flanagan about it, but then he took his laddish style to a different place – more original, but less funny as he told a silly repetitive story.
There was a hint that maybe if this wasn’t being broadcast during the day he might have been more crude. A gag about role play in the bedroom might have benefited from a post-watershed slot. He was also the first act to have a visual element - pulling a face got a roar in the room, but I'm not sure how listeners were supposed to decide whether it was any good or not. Not laugh-a-minute but still a lot of potential here.
Last year’s closing spot was winner Steve Bugeja. Could Brennan Reece from Lancashire repeat history? Probably not, even though he had plenty of energy and amiability. It was just that gags about the internet, his family and cheap child labour felt over-familiar.
Yet there was something about his personality and rat-tat-tat delivery that was very winning. A routine about his teenage niece drawing on her own angry eyebrows when she loses her temper was well sold and his observation about the gayness of being a football fan seemed to touch a nerve. In fact of all the acts this was the one that started off the weakest and maybe ended the strongest. If only he had finished on the high of his soccer riff maybe he could have been a winner after all.
