Jim Bowes: Obsession
Live Review

Though an affable and engaging presenter, Jim Bowes lacks a strong direction in a show too short on strong punchlines to stand apart.

In part, this is loosely based around a contrived comic quest, with Bowes challenged to appear at all 12 of Edinburgh’s festivals, his progress dutifully charted on pointless histograms.

Bowes certainly likes his PowerPoint: having spent three years away from comedy to work as an IT project manager for a bank, he’s absorbed that curse of corporate meetings and can’t help but have a slide behind him throughout, sometimes reducing him to reading the bullet points we can all read for ourselves. This technological crutch is mostly a distraction, far from an essential aid to the show.

Alongside this, he talks about obsession from Roland Rat to He-Man, Vanilla Ice to collecting mugs, Lionel Richie to sending letters of complaint. A cynic might think these are just things has a scrap of material on, rather than obsessions, for there’s no real substance to any of the routines that goes beyond, say, explaining why Skeletor was way cooler than He-Man.

It seems as if Bowes has examined how comedy shows tick, right down to leaving ’em with a moral (‘embrace your obssessions’), but dodged the lesson about having a real passion and something to say – or at least lots of gags.

He is a confident, eloquent speaker able to maintain the interest in even the thinnest of material, and proves decent company over the hour. But ultimately there’s just too little here to obsess about.