Alistair Barrie: Urban Fogey

Sharp-suited satirist Alistair Barrie is getting old. It's only natural he wants to talk about it, so over the next hour he mines the vein of feeling a bit of a middle-class fogey for jokes, weaving these anecdotes into his other favourite tapestry: current affairs. He's a good little digger, too, extracting laughs from fields already thoroughly picked over by others: the weather; tattoos; the nationalities of various audience members; the mutually exclusive identities of being a comedian and of being a decent boyfriend. This is fun, but largely unremarkable.

Barrie does come well-equipped with the nuts and bolts of solid comedic technique, though. He's a master of the overblown simile, or the bombastic analogy (a recurring formula: "it's about as welcome as an A at a B"). They are generally inventive, the trope typically working best when the most heterogenous of ideas are yoked together. But these are punchlines you can spot coming a mile off and, rather like receiving an above-average pair of socks for Christmas, the satisfaction wears off once you realise they're fundamentally the same as the last pair. Moreover, while he delivers faux-rants with some degree of aplomb, Barrie too often relies on the tired stock outbursts which make for a rusty toolkit: "X can fuck off"; "can you believe Y?" etc.

It's a shame since, when he does let his genuine lefty discontentment out of he box, he's a convincing performer. Barrie is pretty good at what he does. It's just that what he does is a little safe.