Bec Hill Is More Afraid Of You Than You Are Of Her!

Symptoms of Bec Hill’s self-professed fear of her audience include self-deprecation, over-friendliness, and a heavy reliance on props, silly puns and visual gags. Clownishly combining them all is what most endears the Aussie comic to this crowd. So much so that an unfortunately-timed joke about a gun-wielding punter draws her show’s first big laugh. Whimsy is often underrated. 

Hill's second Fringe show is structured around a sort of crowd therapy, in which its members are invited to help overcome her phobia of them.  It’s a cute device and when Hill deviates from it, the source of her fear is clear. Without her wall of quirky props there’s little else to her set. Straight observational standup just doesn’t suit her, as a section on airplane turbulence suggests and, after some wonderfully hammy lip-synching to a cassette of seedy chat-up lines, it feels fairly flat. But Hill’s use of multimedia can brighten up even the most childish gag; a daft yarn about a fishing trip gone awry is much improved by her merely turning the interactive pages of a homemade flip-book. Still, her constant demonstrations of her artistic skills become tiresome towards the end; a paper Dinosaur music video feels closer to a birthday card than to comedy. Crowning an audience member ‘Best Heckler,’ though, is a wonderfully memorable and clever moment.

HIll's show is peppered with enough of these to suggest a fair amount of potential; perhaps if this Fringe run achieves it's therapeutic aim, Hill can bring a bit of extra clout and consistency to her future exercises in whimsy.