Review of the final of the comedy competitions sponsored by Magners

Twenty-four hours ago, Ashlee Bentley wasn’t going to the Edinburgh Fringe. Now, thanks to winning the Share the Craic competition sponsored by Magners, she is.

Her prize, worth an estimated £15,000, is a funded run at the Underbelly. But with great reward comes great responsibility, as she must now have an hour-long show ready to go in little over a month. 

She might well have the material, but two of the five acts on the final struggled greatly with the 20 minutes they were afforded, feeling a very long way from being festival-ready. Despite the classy settings of Underbelly Boulevard, this was not the spectacular West End showcase Magners would have hoped for.

The opening act, Tim Biglowe, started strong, with a flurry of gags about his appearance. Resembling Ross Noble, he has plenty of quirky and self-effacing lines about being a shaggy-haired outsider, something of a hippy.

He delivers with an easy flow, chatting about moving to Preston and his low-rent marriage proposal, made in the romantic hotspot of his local Wetherspoon’s. Given his poverty, no wonder every wallet-straining suggestion of his wedding planner was greeted with suspicion.

This story’s amusing enough, but marked the start of a winding-down in his momentum. Subsequent complaints about feeling too old for clubbing now he’s in his 30s seem too familiar, and petered out into nothing. A return to solid gags about his appearance picked things up again as he closed, but he’s on shakier ground whenever he moves off that limited topic.

That Bentley also mentioned the travails of clubbing at 36 underscored the ubiquity of the premise, though here, as with most of her set, she had a distinctive, low-key quirky take on it.

Deadpan and socially awkward, the Irish comic sums up the foundation of her act with the line: ‘I’ve had a shit life so far’ - with a list of supporting evidence to follow. With self-deprecating deadpan, she admits that she uses comedy as therapy.

Disappointing her mother by coming out as bisexual, she also discusses being married to an older man, with her protests that it doesn’t mean she has daddy issues convincing no one. And while she’s tough on herself, men do not get the most sympathetic of rides here, either.

While this is not a set full of zinging punchlines, her offbeat approach appeals and she forms her thoughts into quirkily odd phrases and mental images that consistently surprise and amuse. She was one of only two of the five finalists you could imagine sustaining an hour, so a deserved winner.

Adam Jones is also socially awkward, with nervous affectations to his delivery, which calls to mind an early Simon Amstell. He dryly insists that he’s ‘light-hearted’ and a ‘bit of fun’ – a suggestion quickly undermined by the harshest of jokes about losing his dad to cancer when the comic was just three.

The audience, it’s fair to say, were not on board, yet Jones doubled, trebled and quadrupled down on the subject, to increasing discomfort in the room. I enjoyed the sheer brutality of a couple of these harsh jokes  – but was very much in the minority. And overall, his persistence was definitely more hindrance than valiance.

If he failed to read the room, there might be good reason for that, as another central strand to his routine was his autism diagnosis, with a wittily oblique way of explaining how the test for neurodivergence is ill-suited to the neurodivergent. A chunk about taking a Jamie Oliver recipe literally (more signs of the spectrum, there) also landed well.

But every time he got the room on board, he crashed it again by returning to the abrasive gags about his father that the audience always hated. There is some decent stuff here, and a distinctive worldview, but he needs more time on the circuit to stop making it such hard work  to enjoy the good bits.

Yet he was a laugh riot compared to Katrina Patterson, who performed her 20 minutes to near silence, with just the odd uncomfortable titter to break the ennui. 

Coming on stage with a face like a slapped arse, an attitude that she’d rather be anywhere else and a baggy grey Cookie Monster T-shirt that screamed ‘low effort’, the Scottish comic promised she was going to give us ‘advice in the art of seduction’ via the medium of burlesque - however unlikely that sounded.

That was the single joke that had to sustain the whole set: an unsexy person telling us to be sexy, and performed with zero energy to sell it. 

It felt like the longest 20 minutes of the audience’s life, so one can only imagine how it felt from Patterson’s side. The only thing to her credit – if you can see it as such – was that she performed her full time, no matter how much the room was hating it.

Even after a break, and valiant efforts from MC Joey Page, the mood was still subdued for final act Murph, which means he didn’t get the reception his peculiar material deserved. 

The second act of the night to project an image of a long-haired drug casualty, the comic did manage to overcome the uphill struggle thanks to some inventively eccentric thoughts, on eclectic subjects such as spotting Jesus’s likeness in toast, the word ‘palpable’ or the LGBTQIA+ acronym, and the male mental health crisis.

He’s got a disarmingly casual delivery that almost seems like he’s not trying, just shooting the breeze about whatever comes into his weird head, but that belies the original thoughts that underpin his free-flowing set. Even such a well-worn subject as getting a colonoscopy, he makes his own.

The comic, who won Manchester’s Beat the Frog competition in 2024 and was a BBC New Comedy Award contestant last year, was the second after Bentley you could imagine sustaining an hour. But it may be better for his career in the long run not to have won, and hit the Fringe with an even better show later. 

Review date: 1 Jul 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Boulevard