Chris Addison

In the five years since his last Fringe appearance, Chris Addison got famous: first as a childish civil servant in The Thick of It, and more recently as the headmaster in Skins. His appeal has broadened, which might explain in part why he has abandoned the ambitious thematic format for which he made his name as a standup in favour of charming but insubstantial stuff about how awkward it is to be middle-class, and how some things—golf, the Pope—are a bit silly, when you think about it. Mostly, though, it seems that now Addison doesn't need to stand out; now he can sell out the Assembly Rooms at £17 a pop, he's not too bothered about doing so.

His jokes about the English are the laziest. The English are a nation of moaning, hypochondriac, status-obsessed, sexually repressed wimps who like to listen to whale noises as they enjoy their Waitrose bath oils. If all that sounds familiar it's because people have been making these jokes forever.

Addison remains a charming and—for those who know him best for his sarky character in The Thick of It, at least—a surprisingly animated performer. He stomps around the stage with total confidence, becoming a flurry of angry gesticulations and apoplectic stutters with each new middle-class outrage. And while his subject matter is predictable, the show is anything but unprepared: the hour plays out effortlessly, with each planned or improvised digression offering a break from the the steady flow of jokes without disrupting it entirely. But the jokes themselves are a bit too safe, and rely too heavily on Addison's young-fogeyish stage persona.