Review by Steve Bennett

Mearns’s Shaggy Dog Stories ramble around the experiences of an ordinary Glaswegian who always wanted to be a butcher but instead finds himself jetting around Eastern Europe in search of a cruise ship to entertain. The inmates of those ships are spoiled; the Adriatic should be enough for them, it’s the poor souls left to the grind at home who really need his skills.

Granted he’s a bit of a pisshead and you may prefer not to actually share his flight to ‘unreconstructed’ Dubrovnik, but you’d want to be first in the bar to hear about it when he got back.

He makes great use of the family in the front row, whose young son he guarantees will enjoy the language, while his mother will doubtless find it excruciating. She takes it all in very good part, as it is meant, while the lad laps it up as predicted.

Right in the middle of the show is a rant about the NHS raking in subsidies from the smokers and drinkers it disparages, which Mearns backs up with some jolly good statistics. There may be one too many lost luggage stories, but it’s a tiny, forgivable flaw.

Mearns is unpretentiously, straightforwardly funny. He will provide you with a health-giving hour of laughter, just avoid the front row.

Reviewed by: Chloe Smith

Review date: 1 Jan 2008
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett