Review by Steve Bennett

This dazzlingly unique and delightfully modest piece of ambient late-night entertainment is perhaps the quintessential fringe experience.

Utterly ambiguous, refreshingly modest and hypnotically dream-like, this offbeat and deadpan show is much more about creating a mood than a laugh. Indeed, I'm not sure if it really is comedy - but then I don't quite know what it is.

Mild-mannered Julian Fox passes around dreary holiday pictures, reads melancholy paragraphs he's written on shreds of paper and sings monotone songs for half an hour. Not only is that a show, it also turns out to be an eerily haunting one.

It's irresistibly endearing and seared with sadness, yet ultimately all about finding glimmers of hope in despondency. Or perhaps it isn't.

But any show that can generate a genuine feelgood factor simply by switching on a disco-style rope light clearly knows how to manipulate emotions, even if you're not sure what those emotions are.

This otherworldly experience is strangely funny, and funnily strange. What a lovely little show.

Review date: 1 Jan 2001
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett