Review of the final showcase

It’s not a great time to be a public service broadcaster in the UK, but credit where it’s due for their backing of the comedy circuit. One day after the BBC unveiled Eli Hart as their New Comedy Award winner for 2025, Channel 4 crowned the recipient of the Sean Lock award, designed to reward ‘distinctive comedic spirit and boundary-pushing comedy’.

The slick and personable Dane Buckley probably isn’t expanding those boundaries much, but he’s the safest pairs of hands to open the show, winning the audience over from the moment he camply trills ‘Hi-yah!’  and holding them until he ends by inappropriately flirting with a straight guy, that dependable stand-up trope.

As a gay Irish-Indian man, his set is a mix of heritage gags and knob gags, sharing fond and funny reminiscences of his Asian grandmother’s cooking and the withering putdowns of his fierce Irish mammy. Well-intentioned older people getting LGBT issues a bit wrong is a rich seam of gags, both in his family and at the hospice where he works, source of a few darker lines and a topic offering potential for more development later.

Samira Banks is the daughter of Iranian refugees, which inherently gives her comedy a political edge whether she wants it or not – at the moment especially. Her instincts are generally sillier than those expectations, and the two sides combine well in a gag about asylum-seekers working for Deliveroo – although a segment about what a burkha can be concealing seems more familiar.

She has wry, witty comments about dating and wanting to be a ‘dad’, as well as a couple of bleaker ideas, which distil into distinctive punchlines. delivered in a relatively reserved style, but topped with a winning cheek.

Sydney May says of her puns about being a blind woman with two prosthetic eyes: ‘If you’re uncomfortable, that’s the intention.’ Though in truth she’s so disarmingly direct and matter-of-fact about her situation and the awkward moments it can present for others that she’s very easy company.

‘I’m bossing it quite well for someone who can’t see,’ she says – and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. She may be prone to the occasional mishap, but they, along with the many absurdities she faces, only serve as grist to her comedy mill, industriously producing sharp punchlines to each situation.

Tom Towelling starts by singing the national anthem, correct words and all, but with absolutely none of the deferential decorum those lyrics suggest, thanks to the vocoder that morphs his voice into a silly tone. It’s a simple idea, but no one’s thought of it before, and he executes it brilliantly.

He’s a commanding performer, happy to dash to the back of the room for a gag or deliver lines from in front of the stage. His physicality enhances the musical trickery and daftness, and when he delivers what could be considered cheesy material, he does so with a faux-smugness, just to play the idiot. He seemed like the most Sean Locky of the Sean Lock finalists, which is clearly what the Channel 4 judges were looking for, as they crowned him winner. 

However, the broadcaster’s head of comedy, Charlie Perkins, was at pains to point out that the decision was also based on previous performances and future ideas that the panel had looked at. The idea was not to put the comedians under too much pressure just for this one night (expertly compared by the vivacious Amy Gledhill, by the way), though there was surely no escaping that.

The first half was rounded out by Paul Hilleard, who won the BBC title last year – and it’s easy to see why, given his uniquely absurd observations. With an unkempt look and semi-detached delivery, he projects the appealing image of a man not too successful at life but still clinging to hope – while his outsider persona fits the way he thinks about things most people wouldn’t consider. Worms’ mental health, for example.

His writing is both offbeat and very specific, so even in the rare moments he follows a formula such as ‘what I look like’, the precision and obscurity of the observations make them zing.

Compared to that stoner-ish style, Sharon Wanjohi exudes the more unhinged energy of someone just mucking about, from excitingly telling us she has big news at the start of her set to casually lying on the stage and asking an audience member awkward questions about race as if they were teenage girls discussing crushes in their bedroom.

She mocks herself for being ‘late Gen Z’, just old enough that references to Skibidi Toilet or 6-7 sound ridiculous in her mouth. Her motto is ‘involve whimsy in your life’, which she does in everything from impersonating a jazz singer to imagining a baby as something of a roadman. It’s a scattergun approach that’s impossible to follow and doesn’t always land,  but an enjoyable ride if you submit to her idiosyncrasies.

Roger O’Sullivan was slightly more hit and miss and at one point had to say: ‘Let’s address it - you’re not all laughing’. But those who were, were enjoying his nonsense greatly. 

He put great store on cheaply-animated visuals to illustrate books which really shouldn’t have audio versions, but was probably stronger on more gently quirky sections, such as the loss of gifts from cereal boxes, or the peeks into his relationship with his typically old-school taciturn Irish father. He got stellar reviews for this mix of the ridiculous and the personal at Edinburgh, but it’s harder to gel in a short set.

Limahl Germain is an easier prospect to get on board with, genial and good-natured even while resignedly accepting the fact he’s never going to afford a house. His set’s a mixture of the surreal – anthropomorphising cats, for instance – and the truth of his life. 

As a young, working-class black man, he says his old middle-class female therapist just doesn’t get him… but his audience does. His writing might not always have the hunger for a punchline that would step it up a level, but he’s dependably amusing with a lot of easygoing charm.

Emer Maguire is autistic, gay and Irish - but the element of her identity she most wants to talk about is being a middle child. She’s even got a song about it. And why not, as she’s a useful songwriter, though not always an especially inspired one. One track  is simply a list of things you might find in the Lidl middle aisle.  

She has a short, engaging section about her neurodiversity leaving her confused by idioms, but too often reaches for the familiar, whether it’s a dick joke or the observation that schools teach you Pythagoras but not how to do your tax return.

Thor Stenhaug’s already attracting much attention, cemented by a strong Edinburgh Fringe run this summer. He’s a deft performer, talking about  the obvious things he needs to address – his Scandinavian background, the expectations of that first name  – with efficiency and aplomb. 

He’s slick and compelling as he jokes self-effacingly about gaps in his English, while there's a dark side to his backstory about being the child of a one-night stand, which he relates with wit in each detail. Already he’s a consummate pro – and in a second language to boot.

Out of competition, last year’s winner – the ‘busy-brained’ Harriet Dyer closed the show with her manic stream-of-consciousness set about  a driver with a very peculiar medical issue, bizarre ways out of potential road-rage incidents and ‘out-crazying’ a mugger. He, like us, was  presumably beguiled, confused and amused in equal measure by a manic silly goose with no apparent filter on what nonsense will come out of her mouth. You listen out of a car-crash fascination with how mad she really is. But you stay because it turns out to be uniquely funny. 

Review date: 21 Nov 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Bradford St George's Hall