Brighton Fringe comedy review by Steve Bennett

It’s billed as a fusion of stand-up, cabaret and documentary about the ‘social anthropology’ of debt. But like so much in  the financial services world, you may end up feeling like you’ve been mis-sold something.

For Jamie Scott Gordon’s Brighton Fringe show is actually a collection of travel tales from Central America, save for the occasional financial fact incongruously thrown in and a coda about unsustainable population explosion, apropos of nothing that preceded it, awkwardly placed at the end.

It may have been that the Scottish comic’s show changed unrecognisably since the programme deadline: but probably best acknowledge that and move on rather than try to cut-and-shut two entirely different prospects together.

The show starts in a weird place, too - with graphic talk of jerking off that’s fairly artless, and certainly ill-suited to a 6pm slot in a venue still lit by daylight as small children scamper around. More generally, it’s the sort of novice-level routine that wrongly thinks rude is all you need to be funny.

Most of Gordon’s show, though, is about a trip to Mexico, ostensibly to film a documentary, though it turned into one long Tinder date – with our narrator the gooseberry – once the director turned to the dating app mid-trip.

So he speaks of being edged out of the dynamic, of sleeping under the stars but forever waking under the delusion of wildlife attacks, and of finally hooking up himself over Grinder. The tale’s often entertaining, even if some episodes are a bit too flimsy to warrant retelling in a stage show.

 Gordon – who is primarily an actor by trade – is engaging company, and sometimes flashes an amusing turn of phrase. But to define moderately amusing dinner-table storytelling as stand-up is a bit of a stretch – and Quetzalcoatl knows where he got ‘cabaret’ from. Even as anecdote, it’s relatively undramatic, and too much feels like filler before the strong final story and its rewarding payoff. 

In short, the ‘gold’-to-padding balance sheet is firmly in deficit.

Review date: 20 May 2017
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett