Jollie: Roger!
Live Review

This was disappointing. Last year, musical-sketch double act Jollie had a delightful, if underappreciated show full of knowing farce, pointed banter and subtle touches. But this time around, their delicate magic seems to have deserted them, with an hour that seems more limp and forced.

Their story now is of their eventful six months working on the Queen Mary 2, taking us from the interview they had to pass to land the job, examples of the songs and entertainment they provided for passengers, and culminating in the murder of one of the members of staff. Basically an episodic structure to link sketches together.

Superficially, it’s all presented in a gentle, dare I say jolly, manner – but many a scene, not to mention the show itself, turns nasty at the end, exposing an anger behind their disarmingly awkward stage manner.

Another recurring theme is the way they argue about what they are doing on stage, but the age-old double-act bickering here proved more irritating than humorous, while the deliberately clunky whodunit playlet at the end grated, lacking as it did the subtlety of so many similar spoofs to have graced the Fringe over the years.

Despite all this, John Biddle and Ollie Birch still have charm, and as the only clarinet-accordion-keyboard-and-percussion-playing double act on the circuit have produced a couple of decent songs. And one properly good joke.

But it’s not enough to leave an impact, and a noticeable step back from their previous work that offered so much.