Gareth Richards: Gareth Goes Electric

“I really need the Edinburgh Fringe to work for me this year,” bumbles Gareth Richards midway through tonight's show. Curious, then, that he hasn’t made more of an effort. Gareth Goes Electric is a shuffling letdown of a show that does little and gets nowhere.

The central tenets of Richards’s show are his penchant for Bob Dylan, his children, and supporting Engelbert Humperdinck – all loosely tethered together by a smattering of comic songs. Yet the glaring issue here is that Richards’s material is weak and often quite boring. To his credit, he does play an unusual array of instruments well. But sadly the songs he showcases seem a largely pointless feature and certainly don't produce much by way of laughs.

Worse still is a segment dedicated to negative Twitter reactions to his gig with Humperdinck at the Albert Hall. The joke here is supposed to lie with our sense (as the audience) that Humperdinck's aged fans were simply out of touch with Richard's cutting-edge comedy. Unfortunately it seems they were spot on.