Review by Steve Bennett

This is the festival of the afflicted. In the comedy section alone is a cerebral palsy sufferer, a deaf comedian, a one-legged stand-up and a man recovering from cancer.

Simon Lipson's problem is that he's losing his hair. Doesn't seem quite so important somehow. Yet he's still weaved (no pun intended) a full-length show around his particular condition.

However, you have to confess that it is a successful marketing ploy, he pulled in a decent-sized audience, with an older average than the usual fringe crowd, and a lot of them bald or balding.

At the real risk of sounding patronising, the comedy was probably aimed at an older generation, too. It's a very gentle, drawing-room type humour, with moderately amusing anecdotes quietly but effectively told.

Or, to put it another way, it's too slow and not funny enough.

Lipson is a raconteur rather than a stand-up, and while there are some very witty lines, they are all too rare, as his material is as thin as his hair. (That's a line he uses in the show, incidentally, but it doesn't make it any less true).

The show also offers him the opportunity to play a raft of characters, from his Cockney cabbie father to a whingeing Welshman, as well as wheel out a few tired old celebrity impressions like Robert De Niro and Sean Connery.

It has to be said that he does a great Sting, though, and his David Bowie has a brilliant gag rightly used as the show-stopper.

But on the whole, Losing It seems designed more to showcase Lipson's abilities as a performer than as a comedian, and it ultimately fails to pack a punch.

Review date: 1 Jan 2012
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett