Luke Toulson at Chortle's Fast Fringe

Clip from 2009 Edinburgh Fringe show

Luke Toulson: Too Many Last Cigarettes - Fringe 2009
Live Review

An increasingly irritating bugbear at this festival is comedians using their own shows to enagage in extended club-style banter with the audience. Most performers have worked for a year or more on perfecting their lines – can any off-the-cuff response to ‘And what do you do?’ really compete with such crafted material? Fringe-goers surely don’t pay £9.50 to hear such introductory smalltalk.

Engaging and relaxed, Luke Toulson’s pretty good at this badinage, but still the half-conversations with the audience keep distracting him from the narrative, to an increasingly frustrating degree. It seems like padding – especially when you consider that his whole show is based on the time he woke up, late and hungover, in a strange girl’s house and had to dash across town to make his son’s nativity play. Erm, that’s it.

Flimsy as it may be, that premise is enough to hang on his stories of parenthood and of dating, plus many other observational digressions too numerous to mention. He has a nicely dismissive attitude to his seven-year-old, perhaps because his years of teaching have instilled an instinctive distrust of children, although he insists he is no bad father.

In fact, from his material it seems he has a rather indifferent attitude to life, generally well-intentioned but happy to wandering through a haze of booze, fags and sex, just living for the moment.

He’s charmingly self-deprecating about it, and makes for a good raconteur, but there’s a sense he’s applying those same principles to his stand-up: just idly going with the flow to see where it may take him, where a stronger sense of direction would lead to a much better show.