Seminar

Pretty soon there might be a section within the Fringe programme entirely devoted to spoof lectures, seminars and self-help groups. You can't really blame anyone for trying to crack this comedy nut, it's an easy target – in fact a sitting one. Ex-Umbrella Bird and Mark Watson's missus, Emily Watson Howes's take on the format involves having a fairly full-on breakdown in front of the audience, proving that she's the one most in need of the happiness and phobia-fighting therapy that she's offering.

Howes' character Kimberly lets slip she has suffered various trials in her life that could explain the meltdown: her partner ran off with an estate agent, she's been through a work tribunal and her son is a burglar. No wonder her fear is of failure. This proves rather too apt by the end of the show, sadly. All told it's an unedifying spectacle on both levels and it has been done before.

Worse still the show, even though it runs just short of 50 minutes, proceeds at an interminably slow pace, with Howes coaxing a warm yet still reluctant audience to join in her happiness and de-stressing exercises. One man reads from a joke book, another buries his face in a pot plant because greenery is relaxing, and a woman writes down everything that has ever happened to her in the past. In the hands of Jonny Sweet or Nick Mohammed this would be inspired lunacy but Howes doesn't have the same charisma to carry it off.