The benchmark to beat was set for the second half of the night and it was hard for the others to match it. Sergi Polo, from Barcelona (although he sounded a bit Welsh to me at times) had gentle, amiable innocent charm but that didn’t really make up for a succession of jokes that were OK without being anything special. 

Karen Hobbs, by contrast, was a bit of a whirlwind onstage, packing some real energy into her set. Despite talking about having cervical cancer and getting some laughs out of the unlikely subject most of her material was mundane - her witty description of Stevenage as a cultural backwater was relatable but hardly front page news. 

Freya Mallard had some good lines - favourite position? CEO – and talked about how she gets her own back on catcalls by pretending to be younger than she really is. And when she says younger she means much younger… On a night when pretty much all the acts showed they had enough talent to make it in comedy Mallard was another performer to look out for.

Ania Magliano was already familiar to me from the circuit and she didn’t disappoint, getting good laughs out of her Italian/Polish heritage and her body hair. Magliano also had a good coming out story and a having-a-Brazilian anecdote that makes me wince just thinking about it again. I would have placed her in the top three but she missed out on a podium spot.

I also rated Michael May and it is both easy and hard to say why. He is a new name to me and I presume he is pretty fresh but he just exuded confidence onstage without tipping into arrogance. He seemed to start out by going off script and chatting to the crowd as if it was the most natural thing in the world. When he got into his actual material about relationships it was more run of the mill and he was not placed, but there was something about May, call it stage presence, charisma, that suggests we are going to be hearing a lot more from him. 

Andrew Nolan was another relative newcomer who seemed fully formed. I’m well aware that this is a cliche but Nolan is Irish and telling stories and keeping an audience interested looked like it was second nature to him. His yarn about being bullied by one of the Sisters at his catholic school barely sounded like a comedy routine, more like something told to friends over dinner. Which is not to say it wasn’t funny too, it was just almost too conversational. His material about condoms being illegal in Ireland until the 1980s was better - even if the English members of the audience may have thought he was making this fact up.

Sachin Kumarendran, started out with an amusing observation that his gran had been a codebreaker during the war but now had so much difficulty with modern technology he was starting to wonder if the Enigma code was that complex after all. It was a promising opening that the rest of his set did not quite match, but there was enough here to suggest that Kumarendran will be cropping up again in future comedy competitions.

And finally after a long night Ashish Suri closed the evening, opening with a gag about being mistaken for a couple of famous/infamous people. Suri was big on quirkiness, not so big on getting laughs, though this may not have been entirely his fault. After 14 acts it was maybe not a surprise if the audience was suffering from a spot of giggle fatigue. 

Sam Nicoresti picture: Steve Ullathorne