Diane Spencer: All-Pervading Madness

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Sporting a gingham shirt, meticulously combed long ginger hair, cut-glass accent and an infectiously jolly hockey sticks demeanour, Diane Spencer looks and sounds every inch the pleasant, respectable middle-class girl. Until, that is, she starts telling jokes. The set starts innocently enough with an endearing story about her mother being "carjacked" by a ferret but then delves into fantastically overstated vulgarity, never coming up for air for the rest of the hour.

Ostensibly, she is telling the story of a long and difficult journey back from an unsuccessful gig. Like a hyperactive child, however, she can't seem to focus on anything for more than a few minutes and so before she gets a mile nearer home, she treats the audience to a series of hilarious tangents, among them the story of a particularly uncomfortable manoeuvre with a cooked sausage. Spencer is enormously skilled at turning the complete strangers she meets into a delightfully grotesque cast: a woman with eight boobs and four mobiles; a vagrant policeman called Sherlock Homeless; the railway stripper, Miss Carriage. 

In the hands of a less talented performer, all these individual stories could result in a fractured, confused performance, but in a remarkable last 10 minutes Spencer—in the manner of a magician showing a stunned audience how the trick was done—weaves each of the separate tales into a single brilliant, disgusting whole. The show is so comprehensive, squeezing out every last drop of humour and plumbing every possible depth, that when the hour is up, it feels like you have spent a whole day immersed in her madness.