Just before he brought on the first act, compere Sam Nicoresti jokingly described the sketch comedy coming up as "essentially mucking about". At times over the next two hours it felt as if he had a point. But there was also creativity, imagination and audacity on display.
First on was Big Boys, Christiaan Hendriksen and Ollie West, playing a bishop and a monk. Their interaction was largely silent and visual - one short, one tall – and when they did speak it was in what I took to be either Latin or Italian or both. It got some laughs but over six minutes failed to go anywhere. i wondered at one point if they'd taken a wrong turn when walking down the street – the theatre is next to a Roman Catholic church.
Jim Midge was more what you'd expect from a comedy act. i remembered him from the Musical Comedy Awards final and since then he has been honing his set, mixing oddball jokes and visual gags with stories of life and love in Wooton Bassett. It was character comedy rather than sketch comedy, but tightly written with a fine absurdist edge and landed him second place.
In fact while the final is supposed to be a showcase for sketches there was quite a lot of character comedy. Hannah Whyte played Roger Prick – prick by name, prick by nature, an unreconstructed writer of porn trying to reinvent himself and change from bloke to woke, but struggling to work out the difference between sexy and sexist. It was a punchy performance if not the most original of conceits.
Sardines on the other hand were one of the more conventional sketch outfits in the final, feeling like they were straight out of drama school and on their way to becoming 1980s children's TV presenters. Reading that back does feel a little harsh and there were certainly laughs in their idea of Bob Dylan as a therapist. There was certainly good chemistry here, they just needed a little more of Nicoresti's notion of mucking about.
Nikola McMurtrie, by contrast, was all about the mucking about. After a neat little onscreen intro she came on as Thomas The Tank Engine, but what might have been a fish-in-a-barrel send up quickly went off the rails in a good way, into something much weirder, speculating on Thomas' psychological inner life and much more. It was one of the cleverer acts on the night and well worthy of third place.
Threesome Behemoth, Mo Gascoigne, Heidi Parsons and Tim Carlier, certainly had an original take on comedy. Their set-up kept referring to a corn maze, or was it a pun on corn and maize, I was never quite sure. There was something intriguing about their approach and with only six minutes of stage time it was hard to get into, but they certainly showed potential.
Review continues here
Picture by Steve Ullathorne
