Show Rating:

Most comedians think long and hard about producing their first show for the Edinburgh festival. They make sure they're ready for the experience, hone their material and test it out over and over again. Just because you've got a solid ten minutes doesn't mean you can do an hour ­ it takes a lot of hard work and commitment to create a fringe show.

Durkin however, had only ever done three short open spots before performing this Edinburgh run of full-length solo shows. There's a few ways you could consider this ­ a brave move, a stupid one or unbelievable cocky in thinking that he can do a Fringe show without experience.

To be fair it probably isn't a case of cockiness, but the end result is that we're watching a wet-behind-the-ear open spot that you might normally endure for five minutes (after all, everyone's got to start somewhere) stretched out across 50.

As the audience enters the room it's almost silent; then in the quiet we hear Durkin flick the room light off and the stage lights on and start his short intro CD before he bounds on to the stage.

He turns out to be a genial fella with an easy stage presence - though this may be due to the fact at the point of this review he had been doing the show for three weeks. His material however is just a series of chatty observations; he appears to have forgotten about the gags.

At one point we find him describing the sex lives of the praying mantis and the angler fish and er that's it. Elsewhere there's amiable but unfunny story about his sluttish guinea pigs, a cringeworthy routine about 'motherfuffing' and a lazy generalisation that all men are horny.

The crowd were even helping out, when Durkin notices that a girl has hand cream in her bag it's the guy at the back, not Durkin, that makes the connection with the recent plane terror alerts and shouts "'Arrest her! She's a terrorist!'

Let's hope Durkin has learned at least one thing from the experience ­ that it's not as easy as it looks.

Marissa Burgess