Original Review:

Yet for everything he’s doing right, there’s the nagging feeling that he’s just a bit TOO slick – with brilliantly polished technique compensating for some missing soul.

You just know, for example, that when he trips over a phrase, then riffs around his ‘mistake’, that it’s all in his script, perfectly rehearsed and done night after night. He gives it an air of spontaneity, but somehow it just doesn’t seem convincing.

It’s as if he’s seen other comics do something similar – it’s quite a widespread practice – and thought ‘I could use that …’ And he certainly uses every trick in the book, from mentioning celebrities he could possibly look like, to describing inbred rural folk and their stupid names, to adopting jive-talking rap patois even though he’s clearly a middle-class white boy from the suburbs. When he describes a plan as being ‘so stupid that…’ the analogy could be straight out of Blackadder. Like so much of the show, the line is a very funny one, but it’s not quite in his voice.

This, however, is possibly nitpicking. There is still a lot to enjoy in Thirteen Ducks, which is his story of finding himself in the middle of a duck-hunt with a hillybilly family in isolated New Zealand during a school exchange trip, armed not with a gun, but with a kazoo, to attract the prey to their doom.

Somehow the show also encompasses a recent trip to South African when he was given his own bodyguard, a website where F-list celebrities plug products as mundane as tissues, the unfair cloak of protection the phrase ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ confers, and tips on how to spot whether your nation’s leader is a bonkers dictator. It’s a fast-moving and wide-ranging agenda, but the monologue is fluid, with every topic so skilfully weaved into the next you cannot see the join.

There are plenty of laughs to be had, and the lively Pickering, master technician that he is, prises the very best out of them with a deft turn of phrase, great timing and perfectly pitched delivery.

Yet why does the comedy still feels like it’s coming from the textbook, not from Pickering himself?

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett