Christian O'Connell: You've Ruined My Morning... And Other Fan Mail

Most comedians do their own, "will you welcome to the stage" bit – with varying degrees of success. So when a professional DJ from Absolute Radio does his intro, it sounds pretty amazing.

Then a tall handsome, leather jacket bound Christian O’Connell strides onto the centre of the stage to whoops and cheers from his fans and it looks amazing too. Great start.

Regrettably the rest of the performance sounds like a DJ trying to do stand-up. Cheap, low brow gags are lined up and fired out one after the other to increasingly muted laughter. There are, of course, some good ones in there, but they’re outnumbered and overrun by the next lot of obvious and aged observations. The obligatory Operation Yewtree jokes pop up a few times and get the laughs they deserve and a top ten countdown of the most offensive words on radio feels like extremely dated filler.

The cool confident beginning fades and O’Connell starts to look more and more like Jeremy Clarkson’s struggling understudy. The best laughs come when he reads the letters, tweets etc. that he has collected over the years, these are brilliant and quite inventive complaints from listeners to his radio show.

Sadly it’s not enough. While good, these publicly provided laughs are far too brief to really pull the audience back on board and O’Connell is left to scurry through the remaining material to almost complete silence, save the occasional polite titter to spare him from the dead air.