Owen Powell

Globalisation and faceless coffee-swilling consumerism are mammoth issues, elephantine hot potatoes handled by pinstriped Wall Street hogs and oft-tossed to fire-twirling crusties. Thus, one would presume that Owen Powell’s new show, The Two Closest Starbucks in Britain, would reveal an alternative viewpoint on the whole grubby situation, or at least the wry insights of a jaded little comedian.

Yet Powell gives us nothing of the sort. Steering clear of such thick socio-economic soup, he informs the audience early on that the show will be "non-ranty". Aided by photographs and a power-point screen, he supplies figures, facts and pie-charts documenting Starbucks’ leatherette chokehold, then proceeds to state the distance (in numbers of steps) between various neighbouring branches located in Britain’s major towns and cities.

The comedy is driven by the flippant banality of Powell’s findings – he emphasises the fact that he is not making any large scale "point", and instead is just a "div" with a camera. The show is immaculately presented and is a testament to the creative flair of the comedian, but is weighed down by dense spells of numbers and maps. When a style of humour is rooted in dense and bulky triviality such as this, the slick comic veneer must be thicker.