Colm O'Regan: Hindsight - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Colm O'Regan exudes so much soft-spoken Irish charm, he’s almost a cliché, so even when his material is pedestrian, it’s impossible not to enjoy his company.

Material-wise, however, his Edinburgh debut Hindsight can really only be described as ‘perfectly acceptable’. There are a few good jokes – but no flashes of genius – on topics that are frequently familiar, sometimes a little more adventurous, but never anything to rock your world.

He does find new angles in some well-covered areas, such as his mother’s attempts to text, or talking about Brokeback Mountain via Middle Ireland’s reaction to it. However, routines about prostate cancer or the way school language lessons does nothing to prepare you for real-world conversation s that go off-script compare unfavourably to innumerable other comics’ versions of the same ideas.

As the title suggest, this is, very loosely, a look back at O’Regan’s childhood – when as a confused youngster he got his ideas about romance from Mills & Boon. An extract from his teenage diary – an whimsy that was so popular among comics last year that a whole Radio 4 series was devoted to it – closes the show.

But there’s no strong persona shining through all this, other than a nice guy wanting a chat –not only making it very hard for us reviewers to describe him, but also meaning his adequate material will be forgotten in the swelling sea of Fringe stand-ups.

While some routines are nicely done – satnavs for pensioners, his mother ‘speaking in italics’ when she wanted to hint at something contentious or the service providers’ texts you get when entering new countries even Northern Ireland from the south – overall, this show is a plain bread roll at the festival’s magnificent buffet of comedy.