Window Lickin' Good
Live Review

Wow. With such a hideously offensive title such as this, you might be expecting an hour of shockingly near-the-knuckle humour with a diamond-hard edge.

But no, this is just three grown people who think swearing alone is funny; where stringing juvenile expletives together is enough for a sketch – and not in the beautifully gothic way of something like The Thick Of It – and where ‘fuck off’ is a payoff for more than one scene.

The only scene when this really work is one in which a writer embarks on some horse-trading with a BBC executive about how many ‘cocks’ he can keep in his script for every ‘bugger’ he has to lose for decency’s sake. Only trouble is Pete and Dud beat them to this idea by 40 years.

It has the repetitive format this trio tend to favour, and again not in a good way. When Alan Partridge says ‘monkey tennis’ it’s funny because it’s a tragically desperate man grabbing at straws. When you set a scene in a struggling zoo and start putting random animals and sports together because it seems a bit surreal, it’s lazy.

Writer-performers Rosalind Blessed, Tim Beckmann and Paul Handley – collectively from the troupe known as Fat Hammond’s Banjo Lounge – are decent actors, but have to contend with the sort of dialogue that never occurs in real life, full of exposition and over-reaction for comic effect. Blessed is the stand-out, especially good in bored, mundane roles, but still prone to overacting. So it comes as little surprise to learn later that her father is a certain Brian Blessed.

Meanwhile, the blokes are former members of the sprawling Reduced Shakespeare Company franchise, which was never known for subtle acting, but did have a verve these three seem to be struggling to find, in an admittedly sparsely filled free venue, with noise pouring in from outside.

There are a couple of more interesting sketches, especially the one which seems to be a kidnap scene but is subtly subverted. But too often lazy writing lets them down, leaving them floundering like an ill-conceived student revue.