On stage, tiny Jo Coffey seems a friendly, likeable woman; chatting breezily with an easy, relaxed style and a light-hearted wit.

But this relative newcomer has not yet learned how to marry that with sharp, structured material.

This, her conversational style leads her to beat unproductively about the bush, building up slowly and repetitively to lines that weren’t worth such a wait.

She only skims the surfaces of topics she brings up and sometimes these are barely fresh, such as how depressing are accents from her native Birmingham.

The best material concerns her very diminutive size – most notably other people’s patronising attitude to it – but this is only a minute or two of her set. Fair enough that she wants to prove she can joke about other things, too, but she still needs a lot more evidence to support that premise.

That you warm to her so easily is half the battle won; finding the gags to match could prove a much more difficult fight.

November 2005