Can you be funny when it is daylight outside? It’s a challenge for comedy tents at festivals and yesterday it was a challenge for the New Acts of the Year competition, which kicked off at the ungodly hour of 2.30pm. But the line-up was strong and most of the performances committed. They were also being paid £75 each for their five minute sets, which maybe helped. As compere Arthur Smith pointed out £15 a minute is not a bad pay rate. 

First up was female double act, Revan and Fennell, who hit the ground running with bags of energy and two sharply performed sketches. In the first they played hard nut Hammers fans with a penchant for quantum physics. It was fairly standard juxtaposition but delivered really well. Their second sketch had one of them playing a fictional singing superstar being upstaged by her backing vocalist. Again it was excellently executed, but maybe lower on laugh-rate. It is easy to see why they get compared to French and Saunders. They’ve got the chemistry, they just need to be a little more original in the writing department, but they still deserved better than fifth place.

Second up was Josh Pugh, who was one of the few conventional stand-ups in the final. And even the curly-haired Pugh wasn’t that conventional, going for the quirky pay-off where others might have gone down a more direct route. Some offbeat poems read from a notebook added a note of individuality, but Pugh felt like someone with potential who needed to find their own voice. There were a few too many echoes of other comics here, from Sean Lock to Ricky Gervais. He certainly impressed the judges though and finished joint third. 

Arthur Smith playfully joked in his intro that one of the pleasures of the NATYS is that someone always dies on their arse. That’s a little unfair but Thomas Rackham maybe came closest to blowing it on this occasion. The Midlands comic was an efficient but hardly groundbreaking stand-up. His best routine was about how he livened up his viewing of the Great British Bake Off by cheering for flapjacks as if they were his favourite football team. This was a nice idea but it lost a lot of energy when he pulled out a flag with ‘flapjack” written on it and when he explained that he had accidentally had two flags printed up and was selling the other it was hard to tell how much he was joking. After a promising start this set was one of the few to end on a flat note.

By contrast Emma Sidi’s set was filled with laughs from start to finish. Even though the audience could not understand a word she was saying. Sidi delivered a lecture on feminism - in Spanish. It was an interesting, audacious idea and somehow came off. It’s amazing how much everyone could understand thanks to her wild hand gestures and physicality. Somehow she managed to convince the full house that Harry Potter was a feminist novel by doing a quick mime of Harry’s showdown with Voldemort. Sidi was awarded joint third place.

Next up was President Obonjo who stormed onstage in his army uniform and announced loudly that he did not need a microphone as he was President (though I think he may have had a small mic on his face). This mock arrogance got him off to a flying start – it takes some confidence for an unknown comic to get everyone in the room standing up on command. But halfway through his set – about being an African dictator, but living in St Albans – he seemed to have a crisis of confidence, initially brought on by not being able to get his jacket back on after removing it. There was a nice self-referential riff about how his character was funnier than his real self (stand-up Benjamin Bello) despite the fact that his real self writes the jokes, but it broke the spell. This was crowdpleasing stuff but maybe not clever enough to impress the judges. 

The following act was one of the real oddities of the night. The frock-coated Mr Spooky (Joseph Murphy) was certainly trying to do something different. Imagine a character from a Tim Burton film doing stand-up. His jokes were delivered to backing music and while there were a few good flashes of fun they simply weren’t consistently strong enough. At one point he fell on the floor and faked coming back to life. This looked like a build up to a big finish but actually when he “came back to life” that was the finish.

Maybe a spell had been cast on me by Mr Spooky but I appear to have missed something about the next act. Jimmy Bird was a perfectly good central casting flat-capped stand-up with the clear ability to tell a joke, spin out a yarn and get a laugh. But he did not come up with anything memorable that made him stick out from a number of comedians on the circuit. Yet the judges gave him second place. Maybe they liked his hat.

Review continues here.