Simon Munnery: Fylm

There's a lot to like here. Munnery himself, for a start. He's like your mate's stoner dad. It's impossible not to feel indulgent towards him, whether the one-liner he's delivered was brilliant, shocking, or just baffling.

And this is a cool idea: lurking before a camera at the back of the room, he cobbles together a film of sorts, combining footage of his looming face, cartoons complete with wobbly cardboard puppets, and shots of the bemused crowd. He has a lot of fun with this set-up, for instance contriving a way to pick on people at the front by projecting, huge and vivid, the image of his cruelly pointing forefinger.

There's a pissing-about quality to all this. Some of it's artful, and it's all charming, but it's still pissing about. It's as though Munnery has decided that honing his idea to the point where it's really funny wouldn't be in the spirit of the thing. It seems churlish, admittedly, to criticise a celebrated alternative comedian for being dilettantish, but there you are. Unless somebody steals his idea, the seeds of brilliance it contains will never sprout. By next year Munnery himself will have thought of something else.

It says a lot that the high point of the show arguably comes when Munnery leaves for a few minutes (quick wank-break, apparently), leaving the audience with Mick Moriarty, the guitarist whose strumming accompanies the whimsy. Moriarty sings one song. It's electrifying. Simon Munnery is also capable of transcendence, but he falls short here.