Review of the station’s charity fundraiser

It may be better known for hip hop than stand-up, but this is the second year that Capital Xtra has staged a comedy night for its official charity.

The link between the boradcaster and the channel is Andrew Mensah, the comic who’s a regular voice on the station, who skilfully hosts the 2025 fundraiser at Underbelly Boulevard in the heart of Soho. He strikes gold with his crowd work early on, thanks to his quick-thinking back-and-forth with the minted Cypriot barber and his younger, drunker, partner in the front row. 

His mockery is well-judged, and set against his natural positivity. When he comments that the diversity of this audience gives him hope given the political narrative of division, it’s a sincere and welcome note. But he’s mainly here to take the piss.

Eshaan Akbar’s shtick is that he’s a middle-class Englishman who just happens to come from an Asian background. His insistence that he’s ‘a badman from the hood’ only holds water, he acknowledges, ‘if you excuse the private education’. 

The viewpoint gives him the latitude to make wry jokes about the ethnicity of most Border Force officers at British airports while skewering the flag-shagging racists who’d weaponise observations like that. 

There’s a lot of common sense in his viewpoint – not least in mocking the naivety of Gen Z’s self-satisfied idealism – while his best jokes come from the interplay of the personal with stereotypes – such as accidentally reinforcing a cliché when he acknowledges a fellow brown man, or his experiences on the dating apps, complaining how Asian men are rarely seen as sex symbols.  

When it comes from being from the hood Jack Skipper’s the real deal, as a former carpet-fitter from Croydon without a GCSE to his name. He’s from the cheeky geezer school of comedy, with enough savvy to look back on the all-night parties and wild Brits-behaving-badly holidays of his past with amusement. He’s close enough for the observations to ring true, distant enough to be able to joke about them. 

There’s a lot of ‘remember the 1990s’ nostalgia – a time before people cared much about the physical and mental health of kids – which hits home with a similar demographic, while his punchy delivery and physicality drive the gags hard.

Next up, Prince Abdi brings silliness to his tales of the less edifying aspects of urban living. He delights when an intimidating teenage roadman playing music on a bus is disarmed by camp, or when an homeless man earns a handout from his ridiculously barefaced cheek.

Abdi’s got a strong puerile streak of his own, too, with daft voices and, most effective of all, the stupid physical comedy he forges from his zip-up hoodie. Racism is treated as the preposterous idea it is, while Abdi gleefully celebrates other cultures – most notably Bollywood movies, which he acts out with cheery glee.

Just three years in the UK, Chinese comic Blank Peng is the least animated comic on the bill – and while her more static performance was received with reciprocal calm, the ovation she got at the end proves she went down better than she seemed to think.

Something of a smiling assassin, the sardonic comic delivers edgy, uncomfortable homes truths about her homeland that the CCP would surely frown on, playing up to both Western fears and stereotypes about China while keeping the audience guessing which bits are true and which are myth.

A more powerhouse presence, Gbemi Oladipo, pictured, started with a bit of topical material about the accidentally released prisoners before launching into the more personal anecdotes about being educated at a Nigerian boarding school, his mum and dad having ‘outsourced’ tough parenting to Africa. The tale of being afraid of flying - amplified when on a plane full of over-excitable Nigerians that hits turbulence - is a strong one, and he shares some of his fellow passengers' passion when telling it with compelling verve.

Those engaging storytelling skills are reinforced with a second yarn about encountering Shelagh Fogarty on a railway platform, playing up the tensions surrounding wokeness. Given that she’s a stalwart of Capital Xtra’s sister station LBC, it had added relevance tonight, in tune with the audacity that hallmarks the rest of his hugely entertaining set.

To close, Mensa announced that the broadcaster’s comedy events had raised more than £30,000 so far for Global’s Make Some Noise charity. It raised a lot of laughs too.

Review date: 8 Nov 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett