Guardian Reader

This is a show William Hammer-Lloyd was seemingly born to do – with a neat goatee beard, floppy hair, a background in teaching and an all-pervading liberal sensibility he’s every inch the stereotypical Guardian reader of the title. Hell, he even wears a Guardian t-shirt to drive home the point.

He uses his newspaper of choice, and his shame at his mother’s Daily Mail habit, as a jumping-off point for a series of scattershot musings on Britain’s printed media – from the Mail’s love of sensationalist headlines to the Express’s obsession with Princess Diana and the McCanns.

It’s very much a case of preaching to the converted, a quick poll by Hammer-Lloyd on this particular evening reveals all but two of the audience are readers of the paper affectionally known as the Grauniad.

The narrative gets confused, even lost, at points but that’s forgivable when the the laughs come so regularly. There’s some outdated material – a section on the London riots in particular – and other segments feel like they’ve been shoehorned in to fill up time (a standup resorting to favourite chat-up lines always seems to be a sure-fire sign of desperation).

At barely 45 minutes long, the show doesn’t overstay its welcome; ending with a well-meaning but somewhat trite conclusion about liberalism and fighting oppressors – something, in fact, which would not look out of place in the pages of the Guardian itself.