The second half started with an oddball act that got odder as it went along for the wrong reasons. A man and a women stitched together human centipede-style told the story of their relationship and how, unfortunately, they had now split up romantically, but could not be unstitched.
The problem was that like a number of acts in the final they took the risk of inviting an audience member up to join them. They probably knew they had a problem when he had whipped off his shirt before he had even spoken. From that point on it was a case of damage limitation. Apparently they had stormed it in the heats but fate dealt them an attention-seeking show-off on the night which scuppered their act.
Dude Looks Like a Lady (not a reference to compere Anna Mann, who was comic/actor Colin Hoult in a dress) opened with a cold caller PPI sketch where the tables were turned on the caller before moving quickly into a gym sketch and a sketch in which they discussed romcoms.
It was all good, but never quite great. Maybe I’ve seen too many sketches but I could see the punchline of a toilet queue sketch coming from the moment one of them walked on with another pretending to be her child. There was potential here but not enough of the finished article to earn them a place.
Predictability was a bit of an issue with Laughing Stock too. In their opening sketch the two lewd women harangued a man pressing him for the details of his recent date. When he gave them the answer they were inevitably offended. A simply weird sketch had the two women duelling with scalp massagers.
But just as it looked as if Laughing Stock were out the running they closed with a spoof recording session in which a folky and a gangster rapper were thrown together in an unlikely duet. It still wasn’t particularly original but was very funny. It was a shame it just fizzled out without a proper pay-off, but it was good enough to earn them third place.
The final act was the quirkiest of the night. Kit Sullivan as the Silent Mmmmm definitely had something about him. It was just hard to work out what it was. His stage set looked like a real life computer screen with cardboard pictures scattered about and he got an audience member up to work the “mouse” but this idea never really went anywhere. There was a bear on a chair as well.
Things got better when he talked about his musical career. There was something very funny – again, don't ask me what – about his attempts at singing a Prince song. Just as you thought he had nailed it he would start to growl. With sketch groups it is often easy to see antecedents but this act came out of nowhere. Not surreal in a Vic and Bob way or a Monty Python way. I guess the nearest comparison is Noel Fielding, but even that isn’t close. Whatever he was doing it was good enough to earn the Silent Mmmmm second place on a night that showed that while the sketch format isn’t dead it is still as hit and miss as ever.
Picture by Steve Ullathorne
