This, as part of this year’s return of the full-on Bath Comedy Festival, is the first-ever outing of a comedy night at The Raven.
In the upstairs bar, among chairs and tables and people eating pies, it’s unsurprisingly mildly shambolic.
But, compered by the ebullient and extremely hirsute Dan Dagger, things soon get underway. Dan is no slouch as a comic himself, with much self-effacing stuff about his Welsh roots in Swansea, and the differences between that town and Bath, including an excellent riff about cocaine and its inappropriateness for a man of his age and appearance.
He is also something, clearly, of a godfather figure to the young acts that follow, and there is much jokiness about his supposedly advanced age (39).
The first act up is Sam Hawkins, loud, fresh out of Uni, and with much comment on why that is a reason for taking up comedy, and his intermittent short-lived employments in either pubs or offices. (Pubs are preferable, it seems. Surprise, surprise.) Much, too, about sex, drugs and wanking.
Olly Young, his age in line with his surname, has some very left-field stuff about why bad parenting is not allowed to be pointed out to parents, and even weirder stuff about dropping babies in bins, and which bins to drop them in – which turns out a lot funnier than that sounds.
Ed Roberts is a bit hit-and-miss, clearly trying out material he’s not quite sure about, and his routines about nature programmes and the sainted Attenborough, though getting the odd laugh, are a bit hesitant, accompanied by occasional digs at pals in the audience. Which go down well with the pals, but more work is needed to make it a properly prepared act.
Headline act of the evening is the very whimsical Matt Alford (hope that’s spelt right, the intro was a bit muffled). His apparently rambling but actually sharply observed and perfectly-timed comments on his love life, current events, and, yes, wanking, are added to by very dry no-holds-barred ukulele accompanied songs, which don’t shy away from making comedy out of Ukraine, nuclear war, hating your ex-wife and other topics that really shouldn’t be funny, but are in his expert hands.
A good end to a warm and friendly evening; it will be repeated every Tuesday till 12th April. Will it become a permanent feature in Bath’s comedy scene? We’ll see.
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Reviewer: John Christopher Wood | Star rating: ***
