Review by Steve Bennett

Brian Gittins has a residency at Knock2Bag, giving him the chance to showcase some new material, which has the same appeal and flaws in equal measure as his more practised stuff. He’s Britain’s answer to Neil Hamburger, the awkward anti-comic whose routine is a combination of overly convoluted set-ups, lame payoffs, a few genuinely funny one-liners and distracted non-sequiturs.

His whole ethos is to be a shambles: stumbling with the microphone, laughing nervously to fill uncomfortable silences and grinning inanely at the audience when he seems short of ideas. It’s a mixed bag of the inspired and the inane, often embarrassing but sporadically hilarious; both sides of the acts seeming to need each other to survive.

Tonight, he played down the back story of his character as a roadside café owner trying to break into showbiz – perhaps sensibly now Dan Renton Skinner has become widely known for his similar Angelos Epithemiou character on Shooting Stars – and simply got on with the cheesy, misguided entertainment. As is his wont, he ended with a piece of ridiculous audience participation – a typically twisted scenario involving masks and costumes that’s guaranteed to bring out the laughs.

Review date: 19 Nov 2009
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Bar FM