Tony Roberts: Late Nite Ace High

Early on, comic-turned-card magician Tony Roberts self-deprecatingly describes his late night solo show as 'self-indulgence'. He also talks about his small kids, how he abandoned a high-paid job to become a street entertainer, and repeatedly thanks the audience for turning up. So I don't feel great about agreeing with him but here we go: yes, this is self-indulgence on a huge scale. And how much you enjoy it probably depends on how much you feel like indulging Tony Roberts.

Personally, I took against him pretty quickly. A long, meandering song about women taking too long to orgasm didn't help. Nor did a shorter, but thunkingly tasteless number about an encounter with a transgender Thai prostitute. Or the fact that he follows most of his jokes with a broad, shit-eating grin.

His patter has a laconic, unsettling surrealism to it that would be more intriguing if he looked further afield for subjects. As it is, he focuses all his energies on the legend that is Roberts, puffing himself up with a pub bore's stories of winning free drinks across the globe with a few well-placed card tricks.

These card tricks make an appearance relatively late on in the show, which is a shame, because they're easily its highlight, especially when he invites a bewildered but besotted female audience member onstage to play with an invisible deck of cards. 

Roberts clearly has enough old-school ballsy charisma to hold an audience under his spell. But this unstructured, dragging hour didn't do the trick for me.