Nick Pettigrew is a thirtysomething bloke, who moans miserably about his unhappy single life.

It’s an outlook that lacks warmth, and engenders little sympathy as he covers the familiar topics of sex, dating and pornography.

His material is delivered like a monologue at the audience, rather than engaging with them, which means he comes across as something of a vacuum, offering no measure of the man behind the lines.

That’s not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle for an aloof comic with knockout material, but again Pettigrew is lacking. The bottom line is that the flabby content just isn’t interesting enough to hold the attention till the gag. So when he does reach what he considers a punchline, he tilts his head back and thrusts the microphone forward, a subliminal prompt for a laugh for when the material itself fails.

A couple – but no more – of these jokes prove smart and well-written, but handicapped by the mechanic delivery fail to elicit more than a few titters.

His generally assured poise probably brings a degree of professionalism to an open-spot night; but he’s some way off the major leagues yet.