Mary Bourke: Muffragette

Fuelled by a lifetime of frustration, disgust and righteous anger, Mary Bourke's efforts to bring feminist politics into the nation's comedy clubs should at the very least yield compelling results. She's sick of finding herself the only woman on the bill at circuit gigs and has nothing but contempt for 'edgy' comics whose material bows down before the patriarchy in an effort to score cheap laughs. Few have a platform from which they can draw attention to the gender inequalities that persist within their industry and, with this in mind, it's too bad that Muffragette is so toothless.

This is clearly an honest and personal set, Bourke discussing only subjects and events that she experiences in her day-to-day life, however mundane they are. Anecdotes involving Twitter trolls tend to go nowhere, while all the comedian has to show from hours of exposure to children's television is a weak observation regarding Peppa Pig's fondness for spaghetti and meatballs. A sustained attack on Eamonn Holmes fares better because it illustrates the innocuous forms that misogyny can assume, and is delivered with unmistakeable sincerity.

Were the show to follow in this vein, it would be a caustic eye-opener, but the performer seems reluctant to shift into full polemical mode. Consequently, her message is rarely delivered with the conviction that it warrants, while her jokes simply aren't strong enough to carry the hour. A master of the acerbic one-liner, Bourke could do something really special if she were to tackle her subject with less restraint.