Tom Rosenthal: Child of Privilege

Tom Rosenthal deliberately sets out to be all things to all men in his debut show – and trips over himself in the process. Cheekily he suggests he is ticking off all the boxes required to win a comedy award. One that wasn't ticked off, however, was a coherent theme.

A butler offering half the room a Ferrero Rocher greets us at the door and heralds the titular idea of privilege. While it is never exactly abandoned it is certainly obscured by a number of ruses, for example, a life-meets-art section where the young comic uses various episodes involving his dad, sports presenter Jim Rosenthal, for material. This includes the times when Rosenthal senior described former javelin athlete Tessa Sanderson as “a great spear chucker” and took Heston Blumenthal to court after a food poisoning incident at his restaurant. He must be so proud of his son for reminding us all.

Of course his father probably is proud of him, and why not? Rosenthal is, after all, a star of the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner; he's in the Royal Court Theatre's production of Chicken Soup With Barley and he's certainly a bright spark with some neat one-liners, albeit accompanying a few contrived notions.

The aim is, of course, to be a bright spark without being a flash in the pan and in order to ensure that Rosenthal has to divest himself of simply throwing good ideas in an ad-hoc manner.