Sanderson Jones: Taking Liberties
Live Review

For a show that claimed to be about civil liberty, Taking Liberties could easily have been renamed Taking the Piss, as there was something dubious about a lot of the content.

Packed with material, but rather jumbled, the hour started off fairly innocuously with Venn diagrams and graphs, making this seem like the energetic banter of a school lesson, with Sanderson Jones wearing the demeanour of anamiable geography teacher.

But once we entered the realm of the Chat Roulette website, we drifted into different territory. Potentially this could have worked, had the random users at the other end of a webcam been up for a bit of witty repartee with an audience. But once they saw the assembled crowd, they all moved on. It took the lure of a pretty blonde in the front row to catch someone willing to give it a go, but it didn't last. However, the big risk here is that you do literally expose your audience to something they weren't expecting, as we saw at least one pair of underpants and adjacent hand.

However, it is the picture of a ten-year-old naked Brooke Shields that will really annoy some members of the audience, even if the superimposed photo of Sanderson as a naked baby, defuses the situation. Add to that some full-on female nudity and most of the women in the audience would be starting to feel a little uncomfortable. It wasn't funny, it was gratuitous. We know it goes on but we don't really expect to confront this in a comedy show. Not much liberation happening, either.