Review by Steve Bennett

If we are talking about awards at this point of the festival, Chris Neill must be in contention for the coveted Show Established On Most False Pretences Award 2004. Despite the title and offered description, you leave the show wondering whether Neill has ever even met Andrew Gilligan.

Rather than hiding from these misleading advertisements, likely employed to gather a curious audience every evening, Neill actually plays off them At the beginning, and then sporadically throughout, Neill acts the lecturer, reading from a report that portends to expose fantastical, new secrets surrounding the controversial issue.

When breaking from these deliberately forced moments of sobriety, the 'real' showman is quite possibly the antithesis of what most had been led to expect. Wildly camp, Neill, by his own admission, has nothing to expose and instead offers several stale anecdotes involving people who had possibly been C-list celebrities 25 years ago and his own experiences in a series of ridiculously asinine jobs.

Neill is a decent enough performer, appearing on stage simply as himself. By establishing two different personas (the serious, ultimately fraudulent, lecturer and the camp king of gossip), the show implies that the dominant, less serious personality is authentic and to be trusted. This naturalistic quality of delivery introduces an intimate feel to the show, leading the audience to view him as a babbling friend rather than a man with an agenda that leads all the way to a celebrity chat show.

Even considering that Neill is a naturally charismatic, if slightly grating, performer, the show is fundamentally flawed, as he clearly has no life experiences of any interest to relate to an audience. No level of performance can make Neill's dull stories about zips genuinely interesting, making it suddenly clear why he would pretend to have something to say regarding a contentious issue.

There are some occasional laughs to be had, but they mainly derive from the man's admissible talents for audience banter and amusing rants at the loud show that takes place next door. Neill does referee a respectable finale, involving three members of the audience enacting a thematic parody of a Radio 4 play, but this is the only segment that really functions productively.

Otherwise this is an unrewarding hour masquerading as a potentially interesting one.

Review date: 1 Jan 2006
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett