The Appalling Carly Smallman

Carly Smallman is, she claims, an appalling person. From her complicated birth and messy baby years onward, it’s apparently been a downward tumble into awfulness redeemed only by a golden period as a self-proclaimed teenage geek.

As her musical comedy wanders on, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that Smallman actually isn’t all that appalling a person. On the contrary, she seems eminently likeable; her sunny disposition and infectious laugh doing a good job at covering up some occasionally weak material. Add to that her university degree and teaching qualification and it’s hard to see precisely where she thinks it all went wrong. She points to the moment she took up comedy, but this idea is never really developed.

Her standup, at least, isn’t exactly smooth. Jokes often lead nowhere in particular, meandering to flat conclusions and promising more than they deliver. Indeed, it is evident throughout that Smallman is most comfortable when wielding her guitar and rhyming rude words with flirty phrases – something she actually does rather well. But even then, some songs dwell in predictable terrain.

There are snippets of genuine wit. She dissects middle-class smugness with an incisive, razor-sharp glee, and her ode to the unproductive lifestyle of the self-employed comedian is painfully familiar to anyone who has ever known or been a layabout student. Her voice isn’t half bad either, despite her own disparaging jokes to the contrary.

Sadly, the overall effect is just a little bit disappointing from the woman GQ once deemed “the most exciting female act in the country.”