Review by Steve Bennett

Sometime Comedy Store Player Niall Ashdown proves himself a formidable raconteur with this monologue about a trip he took with his dad to, yep, a Hungarian birdwatching festival.

He always commands the audience's attention, despite the fact that the yarn he spins is actually pretty slight.

For while it's an entertaining enough tale of obsession and the relationships between sons and their fathers, the themes are never truly explored, merely hinted at.

You never empathise with his drive to catalogue the birds of central Europe like some sort of fanatical reader of I-Spy books, meaning the show is always going to be a passive experience.

So all this amounts to little more than a succession of pleasant, and somewhat oversentimental, holiday anecdotes. It's gently humorous, and well told, but ultimately pretty insubstantial.

Review date: 1 Jan 2001
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett