Reviews of Comedy in Leicester 2011

This page is part of the comedy section

On this page: Kirsty Munro | Comedy at The Shed | Reviews of Leicester Comedy Festival | James Mullinger | Rob Gee | Kevin Precious | Fredrik Andersson and Tobias Persson | DMU Student stand ups |

Saturday 29th October

Jim Smallman at highlight.

Jim Smallman Photo © Best Medicine

Jim Smallman is one of our better known local comedians. The Braunstone lad filled the highlight comedy club in Granby Street tonight. Seated at tables, some of the audience had been enjoying a meal before the start of the show and were in a relaxed and happy mood for the two hour show.

Jim acted as the compere are for the Fosters Live show and started by warming up the audience. As it often the case these days, comedians engage their audiences, asking people their names, what they do and generally drawing individuals into the celebration of the evening. A large proportion of the audience were from Leicester but a lot had also come from outside the city. We found this out when Jim asked everyone from Leicester to cheer and then asked all those who were not local to cheer and both sounded about the same.

Most of the tables were filled with groups including one or more birthday parties who were out to celebrate and have a good time. Working an audience is something that Jim does well. The cheeky chappy style worked well, pulling in both individuals and the crowd as a whole.

Supporting Jim Smallman was a line up of comedians which started with Australian Adam Vincent. Like the other acts who took to the stage tonight, his style was narrative humour rather than joke telling. A string of anecdotes and reflections, mainly of a personal nature, flowed from the mic.

Hannah Gadsby, another antipodean act, told the audience that she was a Tasmanian Lesbian and proceeded to talk about her short haircut and her weight. Hannah worked some funny situational stories into her material. When she told her heterosexual brother she was gay, he suggested she tried boys just to make sure. To which she suggested, "Ok, I will if you will". "Nah, just stick to the girls", came back the reply.

Like most audiences in Leicester, the people in the room were keen to participate in the action, clapping and cheering and giving the performers a warm welcome. Mitch Benn came to the stage with his small guitar, possibly a mandolin. The comedy song writer treated the room to some of his funny songs which he delivered very ably, interlaced with narrative and stories. He is coming back to Leicester on 4th February for the Comedy Festival, when he will be playing at the Musician Pub with his band, he told the audience.

All in all, a very enjoyable experiece that had us laughing throughtout the night. Jim Smallman is a character with a lot of presence. Well worth seeing again, we say.

You can find out about dates for the Fosters Live nights at highlight on our Comedy News page. Also, check out our readers offer for tickets to the series of shows.

Jim Smallman | Adam Vincent | Hannah Gadsby | Mitch Benn

More about Jim Smallman

Thursday 14th July

Kirsty Munro at the Crumblin' Cookie

The Crumblin' Cookie has established itself as one of the leading small venues for comedy in Leicester. Situated half way up the High Street's pedestrian precinct, it offers its patrons an intimate atmosphere.

The Crumblin' Cookie's comedy offerings include a new acts night, Improv, performances by touring acts and Edinburgh Festival previews, of which tonight's show is one. It is, of course, busy during the Leicester Comedy Festival (it won the Best Venue Award this year.)

If you squeeze into a gig there you fill find a stylish ambience, a small selection of draft beers and ciders, a large selection of coffee flavours, spirits and of course, a fine selection of tasty cookies.

So, it was a pleasure to come down tonight to this amiable venue to see Kirsty Munro's show. A native of these parts, 28 year old Kirsty does a great job at running the show, warming up the audience, introducing the support acts, shuffling chairs around to fill the last remaining space and doing her act, which took up the second half of the night.

The first thing you notice about Kirsty is that she is a great audience person. Heading up to the Edinburgh Fringe in August, tonight's gig was a warm up preview for that. Her on stage style ranges from exuberant to relaxed. Tonight she loved her crowd and they loved her back. She was happy to pick on one or two individuals in the audience, pulling them on to the stage, jesting with them, firing off salvos of wise cracks to them and all in the best possible taste.

Tonight's gig was called 'Dirty Word' and sure enough it was an hour of thoroughly enjoyable filth. Spinning yarns and situations about sexual peccadilloes, relationships, chat up lines and muddying the waters of relationships, she kept the laughs coming.

Kirsty's material works well in the intimacy of this small venue. Her stories about dating, feminist protesters, rape and much else besides, were delivered with a large slab of confidence.

Her series of tales slipped almost seamlessly from one to the next. So, she would start talking about a being in a football crowd, slide into a story about a 'slut-walk' flash mob, slither into something about a policeman from Toronto, then launch into a story about Lady Godiva before leading us into Wimbledon and then the X Factor. It all seems to be one dialogue but is in fact a series of pieces that all hang together in one extraordinary narrative.

I mean this in the nicest possible way, Kirsty reminded of the younger Jo Brand, not in shape of course. Jo had that dry wit, that raw edged set of observational humour, those biting comments that just slipped off the tongue, fired off with a cheeky smile. So I kinda hope we will see Kirsty as the next Jo Brand.

Kirsty Munro is very much part of the new breed of comedians. Leaving behind the gag telling, pub humour of the previous generation, she has earned her place in the contemporary wave of narrative humorists. Funny, witty and vivacious, she kept tonight's audience engaged and earned their heart felt appreciation at the end of her act.

An excellent night from one of Leicester's rising new stars

We give Kirsty Munro a four star rating for this gig: * * * *

Read Kirsty Munro's blog | See what's coming up at the Crumblin Cookie | Explore the Edinburgh Fringe Programme

You can see Kirsty Munro at The Artsin show at the SoundHouse on Saturday 20th August.

Mike Brown, Steve Travis and Gareth Dunn at the Crumblin Cookie

The first half's support acts featured three student comedians: Steve Travis, Mike Brown and Gareth Dunn. Performing for the first time, their brand of mad-cap, Pythonesque humour was a good laugh. Derby comic Maxine Finch made a come back to the stage tonight after a long absence. Her bang up to date material about corruption and the News of the World was a spot on take on current affairs.

Maxine Finch at the Crumblin Cookie

Thursday 7th April 2011

A Shedful of Laughs

An unusual venue for comedy! So Artsin headed down to the Shed to check it out. A great night of funny stand ups, some of them from Leicester/shire.

The Shed is a live music venue in Yeoman Street. More used to seeing bands on the stage, it provided a congenial atmosphere for a comedy night, sponsored by Twist and Shout. Compared by the witty Jim Shields, the night went well and the audience was soon chortling to the jokes and wisecracks. This was the first official comedy night at the Shed and as Jim said, "we hope there will be more." Well, Artsin votes for that! A bit like 'Live at the Apollo' on a micro scale, it was a friendly evening of fun.

First up was Kirsty Munroe from Leicester. Her set of stories about ladies and sex soon got the audience involved. Rather rude and fantastically funny, she pushed the act along with a her vivacity and presence. Lots of action on the stage and some really funny ideas, her saucy humour got an enthusiastic response from the crowd. Like most of the acts on tonight, there was a lot of audience interaction and in the intimate ambience of the Shed, that worked really well.

Carl Jones took to the stage. The young comic from Ripley in Yorkshire had some original material in his stories about himself. A narrative of amusing reflections and slants on life, he talked to the gathering and evoked a considerable series of laughs and a few bouts of clapping. Some of the stories were hilariously rude but the audience lapped it up.

Market Harborough's Tom Young was up next. Billed as the tallest man in comedy, his hair was dusting the ceiling on the stage, he delivered his set with a bevy of smiles and a goodly helping of original material. And yes, he did make a few jokes about his height, including a discussing with someone in the audience about basketball - "I was in a team called the dynamos. When we ran our shirts lit up". Oh and he had a ginger beard, he claimed, so he made some engaging material out of that. Playing on the issues to do with being extremely tall and ginger got him into a string of reflections on being black, short, one-legged ... plenty of ideas to work with there.

Doing her first gig, "comedy virgin" Helen Coyle joined us from County Wicklow in Ireland. A tall lady with a mass of curly blond hair and a sweet Irish brogue, she soon got into a routine about being "lebanese" and delivered some side-splitting jokes. "How did I get pregnant?", the girl asks the priest. "Was it something in the air?" "Yes", says the priest. "Your legs!". Her long stories finished with thumping punch lines and she left the stage to a warmly appreciative round of applause. So, well done Helen.

Leicester's Leanne McKie took to the mic and warned the audience she had a weakness for spoonerisms. A few references to "cooking socks" followed and much of her set is too blue to be mentioned in this august family journal. But hey, what a funny lady.

Tom Allsop came over from Cannock. With his long hair and rock t-shirt, he talked about being in a band, and certainly looked like he was. He told us that he was a teacher and launched into a series of narratives about his job. With a strong image and an engaging manner, he soon captured the audience. No topic is taboo for today's stand ups. Talking about death, of all things, Tom said "I'd like to escape cancer long enough to die of a heart attack." But then that has always been a role for comedy, ever since Shakespeare placed Hamlet's clown in a freshly dug grave, and comics help make life's issues a little more bearable by getting us to laugh at them.

A really good night down in the Shed proved that comedy is a well establish part of Leicester's entertainment scene, not just for two weeks in February but all year round. So, should there be more Shedfuls of laughs? We say, bring it on!

Leicester Comedy Festival 2011 Reviews

This year we cover the Leicester Comedy Festival for the first time. Our reviews don't cover everything going on - that would be far too much for our meagre resources - but we have responded to the acts that have contacted us with their dates. Often new, rising talents or established people with innovative new shows, we have really enjoyed meeting these performers and getting into the more intimate moments of the festival.

James Mullinger | Rob Gee | Kevin Precious | Fredrik Andersson and Tobias Persson | DMU student stand ups

Tuesday 15th February - The Crumblin' Cookie - James Mullinger

James Mullinger presented his show: James Mullinger's School Days. In this highly original, autobiographical narrative about being at school in the 1980s, James took the audience through his school years, from the despondency of primary to the reckless insanity of his secondary boarding school.

Presenting his evidence on a screen at the back of the stage, he delivered an extended case study of teacher's reports, photographs and even videos that laid bare his story from about age 11 through to his escape from the 'gulag' of education at 18.

Just as Kevin Precious had exposed education from the teacher's point of view, so James stripped off the finery of academic institutions from the pupil's perspective.

Having done his own warm-up slot, James returned to the stage in his costume: a specially tailored school uniform, complete with cap. Half school boy, half clown, he knew exactly how to play the part.

From the word go, he drew the audience into the act, interrogating individuals and picking up on their comments when talking about his own experience. The image that emerged was of a mature family man with a wife, young child and familial responsibilities, looking back at his wayward adolescence. His act was delivered with a rumbustious vibrancy that the packed-in audience responded to warmly.

A failure at school, beaten up and bullied, accused of being gay by the other students and of having learning difficulties by the teachers, he shredded the nonsense about school being the 'best days of your life.'

In a stream of anecdotes that were "filthy but true", he admitted that he was "not very good at keeping anything to myself", giving the impression that his act was half confessional, half exorcism of the trauma of being at school.

He catalogued his "debauched life style" as a teenager, in minute detail, producing, as exhibits, a diary he had kept, photocopies of reports and documents, photographs and a series of videos he had made in the latter months of his sojourn at the prestigious private school he had been sent to.

Ok, a bit like an updated version of Adrian Mole, it often had the fantastical aspect of Harry Potter. Some of the tales were unbelievable but he took pains to produce the evidence that imbued the narrative with reality. It was like seeing the edited highlights of the worst bits of a stay in the Big Brother House, a story populated with odd characters, bottom clenching happenings and the James Mullinger of yester year.

A Tom Brown for the twenty-first century, he unfolded a tale of alcohol abuse, drug taking and sexual exploits that would make Pete Docherty look like an alter boy.

With a breathtaking and at times naive honesty, he beared his past to the 'jury' sat in front of him and you were left wondering what verdict they would come to. Was James the innocent victim of a deeply corrupted system or the wayward and troubled adolescent who rebelled against it?

Like many autobiographical narratives, he presents the story and leaves it up to you to draw your own analysis and conclusions.

After the show Artsin sat in on a video interview with James. He explained that he had put the show together by editing material - documents, photos, camcorder footage - that he had kept from his school days. Based in London, he has been doing stand up comedy for five years. He has played Leicester before, making appearances at the Looking Glass for the Ship of Fools night, where he got his first review in Chortle magazine. Last year he appeared at the Criterion.

James: The Leicester Comedy festival holds a special place in my heart. I have played at the Crumblin' Cookie before and I love it here. I always get a good crowd in. Leicester is a great place to come and do comedy. I have been very lucky in Leicester; it's a great place to come to and many other comedians have said this to me. Every gig I have done here has been really great. Leicester people are warm and responsive.

I always wanted to be a stand up and I did a course in comedy in London. I spend a lot of time traveling around the country, although I still have to hold down my day job. I have to balance my home life, my family and baby with performing; it's pressurised and stressful but I love it.

He came across as a devoted father, a bright, sparkly, affable guy, friendly and approachable. If James was a dog you would definitely want to stroke him.

See James Muling on YouTube

Sunday 13th February - The Y Theatre - Rob Gee

Artsin went to see Rob Gee's show SmartArse at the Y but before that we caught up with him to talk about his show and his work as a poet and comedian.

Photo by © Nick Rawle

Artsin: You're one of the best known poets in Leicester; but are you a native?

Rob: I was born in Derby actually and all my family are mad keen Derby County supporters. So they regard me as being a little treacherous, for going to live in Leicester among rival fans. I moved here to train to be a psychiatric nurse, when I was a teenager. Now I can best be described as a stand-up poet, which is like stand-up comedy but with rhymes.

Artsin: So you use poetry as a vehicle for getting your ideas across?

Rob: Yea. It started off because I grew up on punk rock and I still love punk rock - The Clash, Dave Kennedy, Anarcho. In my early twenties, I started to do poetry and it was an excuse to chuck myself all around the stage without having three or four other people to bump into. I did start singing in punk rock bands and it evolved from that. The act combines the best bits of comedy and poetry, i.e. it lasts a lot longer than most stand up comedy ... or, it's the best bits of me. It's not funny enough to be comedy or not worthy enough to be poetry. It means that being a stand up poet, you can perform at all sorts of different gigs. I like to entertain audiences and have fun on stage. But, I don't like to be restricted to getting a laugh every five seconds. All my favourite sit-coms and dramas have got lots of light and dark in them.

Artsin: So, is there a bit of a message, issues, a bit more depth than the average pub humour?

Rob: I like to think so but I am very wary of preaching at people but I like to probe people's conscience in an entertaining way.

Artsin: So they can take home something more to think about than most comedians achieve?

Rob: I hope so. It depends on the nature of the gig, on what I'm doing. The most successful show is called 'Fruitcake', which is based on my eleven years as a senior staff nurse in acute psychiatry. For me that was a very necessary show for me to write and perform. Everyone has some sort of interest in the world of psychiatry and mental health ...

Artsin: It goes back a long way ... Shakespeare had a go at it.

Rob: Absolutely, yea, and a lot of the criticisms of psychiatry are very justified. You very rarely ever get to hear the Nurse's point of view. We spend a lot of time with the patient but very rarely does any ask us for our opinion. I wanted to articulate the experience of being a psychiatric nurse and to de-mystify the quagmire of mental health but also make it entertaining. It is a quagmire to write a comedy about mental illness. You're dealing with people who are ill but you can be so preoccupied with passing on a message, that it's not funny.

Artsin: It's quite interesting that people working in arts and mental health are actually using comedy in therapy. Mental patients - service users - are using comedy as a vehicle to expose and explore things in their own experience.

Rob: This would have been considered totally outlandish five years ago but it's not now. It's a positive recent development. Five years ago I had just left nursing and if I had said "I want to use comedy as part of some therapeutic package", I would probably have been sectioned myself. I think it's moved service users beyond the world of survivor's poetry but my criticism of a lot of it is that, at its worst it perpetuates people's sense of victimhood and whilst their grievances about Psychiatry were very legitimate, there is nothing else beyond that. A lot of people just go on stage and articulate their grievances about the system. When you're doing a comedy workshop with ten service users, you realise that you're in a room with hundreds of years of life experience and the experience of mental health is only a fraction of it. There are lots of in-jokes about Psychiatry but they are done in a satirical way. At its most acerbic we are using laughter as a weapon to make exactly the same points as the 'survivor poets' were making, twenty years ago but without restricting ourselves to commenting on the Psychiatric System.

Artsin: Some of these service users are now using rap as a vehicle to express themselves and their experiences about drug taking, depression, suicidal tendencies ...

Rob: Brilliant! If you're in a school doing a workshop and they don't like poetry you mention rap to them, they all like it. People like poetry as long as it's working for them. Saying you don't like poetry is a completely blanket statement, like saying you don't like music. There always something that people like.

Artsin: It's like when you were at school you were forced to read Wordsworth.

Rob: I think my favourite poem ever is one called "Dooley is a traitor" which my mum read to me when I was about ten, which was written by a pacifist poet James Michie - all about a conscientious objector on trail for murder. If he refused to join the army they would hang him but he didn't want to kill a stranger. I think the school system generally has a lot to answer for. Not just killing people's love of poetry but killing people's love of learning. The show I am doing at the Comedy festival - SmartArse - came from a conversation I had with a bunch of nine year olds. It was a conversation about never growing growing out of playing a game called Tig or Tag ... wouldn't it be wonderful if you were walking past the Clock Tower and saw a bunch of men in suits playing Tig. There are certain improvisation games in primary schools that kids love doing and then you go to a school with a load of fourteen years olds and it's gone. I think schools have actually been designed to discourage imaginative thinking. Thinking imaginatively isn't going to help them pass exams.

Artsin: So what are you trying to achieve when you go into schools?

Rob: I suppose a lot of it depends on the brief but if I go into a school, it's either to do stand-up poetry or sketch comedy or improvisation workshops. My whole thing is doing comedy by kids for kids. They are generating their own jokes that their peers are going to find funny. Within that there is a side of it about emotional well being and an emphasis on teamwork. A lot of this is about listening to each other. Some of the schools I work in have a problem with literacy, particularly among boys and often that is due to them not listening. They are not used to listening to each other. Listening improves vocabulary which then improves your ability to articulate. Which means you can be less likely to act out your distress about certain things. Which then leads to better behaviour, which then leads to better grades. You can't begin to deal with literacy until you begin to gets kids to listen to each other, working as a team and sharing their opinions. The way we are taught poetry in schools, is that the English teacher would explain why this line is brilliant or what that line meant. But I was never asked for my opinion about what it meant to me. If we are going to get kids to engage with poetry then we need to ask them to give their opinions on it. It's about asking them what kind of poetry they would want to create and making the art form work for them. We don't ask kids to paint like Picasso, we try to get them to develop their unique style as artists.

Artsin: Schools now are driven by targets and results. Does that discourage creativity?

Rob: I am especially concerned with kids with special needs or those with behaviour problems. You can train people to pass exams but that doesn't necessarily foster a love of learning.

Artsin: Absolutely. Another thing about Leicester is that it is an incredibly diverse community, a bunch of people from very different backgrounds. How does that affect what you can do in the classroom?

Rob: Well I often go into schools in Highfields and there will umpteen languages spoken and for the majority of kids English will be their second language. I am of the opinion that the harder kids find to do something the more they should do it. Doing things like improvisation and comedy is a fantastic way of getting kids to articulate and use language. In primary, kids love slap stick, it's not about what they are saying its about what they are doing. Language is part of it but it's a significant part of it. Even if they cannot speak a word of English, it's not the end of the world. They can still function as a team but because there is this emphasis on improvisation and listening they are still picking up and improving their use of language.

Artsin: It's interesting to see, in recent times, the emergence of comedians from different ethnic backgrounds. We have had programmes on the TV using Asian (Indian) actors in comedy sketches.

Rob: The Koomars. We shouldn't underestimate Lenny Henry; he's been around since what the 70s and yea he made jokes about being black but comedians now make jokes about being black or being Sikh. Making a joke about race takes the power away from the bigots. It must have been very difficult when comedians were nearly always middle aged white guys. For all the criticism that political correctness gets, some of that is fair. People forget that we really did need it in the early 80s. Comedy had got itself into a rut with 'Mind your language' and 'Love thy neighbour'. It needed a kick up the backside. People criticise political correctness now, they do it fairly because ... whenever anything liberates, it sets it free. It's great. When something becomes a 'though shalt not' ...

Artsin: ... fanatical devotion to ideology ...

Rob: ... yea, when it becomes restrictive, it's bad. It restricts people's language.

Artsin: ... and you've got this thing about people with disabilities. You don't talk about disabled people any more.

Rob: It's liberating for people who have been made fun of for years to be able to stand up and get their own back. We see a much wider range of people on the comedy stage now; a wider cross section of people are comedians now than ever before. I also get depressed by positive discrimination. I have had agents saying, "I'm after a black actor this month." It troubles me. One of the reasons I love living in Leicester ... I find the act of judging people by who they are, rather than what they have done, utterly reprehensible. I'll be judged on what I have done. I don't have a choice about who I am and neither does anyone else. I hope we can evolve to the point where people are booked on the basis of quality and what they are doing and whether they would be right for that gig.

Artsin: Let's talk about SmartArse.

Rob: There are three strands really. This is a show about kids in schools and how we treat kids which grew out of this conversation about how great it would be if we never grew out of being able to play Tig. What else can we learn from kids, what else are they better at doing than we are. The show is about my Dad's institution where he grew up - a charitable institution. It was for War Orphans and it was quite an unpleasant place. He went there when he was six and left when he was sixteen. The adults all referred to him by his Surname or his Roll number. It amazes me that he has turned out to be the lovely bloke that he is. Quite a lot of the show is about that. The second thread is my own school which was an ordinary comprehensive in Derby. It was unique in that it had Magic Mushrooms growing on the playing fields. I make no bones about dissecting this on stage. The third strand is the experience of going into schools as a comedian and stand up poet. To get kids to create comedy to amuse other kids ... and about some of the quagmires that this throws up. All of these threads sort of seamlessly weave their way into an entertainment and there's a few stories, a few of which are completely fictitious ... all sorts of bits and pieces ... a combination of story telling and slam poetry.

SmartArse

One of the good things about the Leicester Comedy Festival gigs that I have been to is that they have all been full houses. All the seats at the Y - either the tables on the ground floor or the seats in the circle - were occupied. Rob came on the stage and stood in a spotlight. Sometimes the stage lights went up for part of his act and then, when we went into a poem or a story, the spot light was on him. This helped you to follow the structure of the two hours he spent on stage.

He talked about having an 'invisibility cloak' and all the things you could do if no one could see you. This was based on material from his work in schools with kids. His fast talking narrative tore along at an incredible pace. It was amazing that he could remember two hours work of material but to also deliver at an incredible rate of words per minute was just amazing.

He told the story of his father's childhood and his experience in the institution for orphans. He talked about working with kids in school workshops and about his own experience as a Derby school boy. He did a poem about the eighties - a huge list of everything that defined that decade and you hear from the noises coming from the audience that people recognised quite a lot of them.

His cynical and satirical take on education and schooling mocked traditions and revealed his strong stance on how society tries to shoe-horn round kids into scholastic square holes. Two hours of captivating performance passed by very quickly. The narrative threw up a rush of images, characters and plots, weaving together stories and poetry (often verging on rap) into a flow of consciousness that was both enthralling and entertaining, as it was funny.

It's rawness and sensitivity amalgamated into one, sometimes surreal but always engaging set of stories and ideas. Rob Gee's SmartArse was a tour de force of performance poetry and comedy. A funny and thought-provoking two hours of one man ingenuity.

Sunday 13th February - The Kayal - Kevin Precious

Artsin went to see comedian Kevin Precious, who performed his show 'Not Appropriate', at the Kayal restaurant.

Kevin Precious used to be a teacher. The whole teaching/schooling thing seems to have become a theme in our coverage of this year's Leicester Comedy Festival. Not that this was designed to happen, either by the festival or by us. It kind of just happened.

The whole of Kevin's show was about his experiences as a teacher and yes, there were quite a few teachers in the audience. Kevin asked that question right at the start of his set. Teaching, schools and the experience of going to school seems to have provided several of our performers with a happy hunting ground of comedic material.

The title of the set was 'Not appropriate', a typical example of the florid vagueness of middle-class, extended vocabulary that education professionals use, these days.

For his show, Kevin attacked the shibboleths of modern teaching. He used to be a teacher of religious education. His style of performance was audience focused, talking to them like they were a mate he was spending an evening with in the pub. Frequently asking them questions and drawing them into the action, he used the intimate ambience of the Kayal's modest but well packed upstairs room, to good effect.

His hour of fast-paced tales and reflections threw up a good supply of jokes, cracks and humour that had many in the audience chortling almost continuously. Now, it is a feature of the most of the acts we have seen so far, that they nimbly weave comedy with serious ideas, reflections and thoughts. They do this with considerable charm and style, they do not preach, orate or hector; their material has a funny side and a thought-provoking, if not, challenging element to it.

School is something we can all relate to; after all, we have all been through it and I guess that most of the audience would have recognised what Kevin was saying from their own experience. From the antics of the kids through to the dark secrets of the staff room, there was nothing strange or esoteric in Kevin's material. Lots of people are currently watching 'Waterloo Road' where the same kind of stuff is presented each week on the 'telly.

Kevin shares a style of stand up with others that we have seen: the humour of autobiography. Rather than spend an hour telling jokes, this new breed of stand-ups works their own life experience into a series of tales, anecdotes and reflections which they can deliver using their skills as writers and performers.

He delivered a fast flow of acute observations, incisive reflections and witty tales that laid bare the inner life of the teaching 'profession'. Covering a lot of ground, he dredged up a trawler load of detritus about the inner workings of the school, from the teacher's perspective. From sex education to drugs, he deftly touched every raw nerve that contemporary society has about young people and their passage through the educational system. Even getting into the more esoteric aspects of modern teaching like OFSTED and Inspections, playing with words, but always explaining anything that the 'lay' person might not fully understand, he exposed the vulnerable under parts of teaching.

His skills as a writer ably brought to life the characters found in schools; it would work as well as a book as it did on stage. It was clear from the reaction of several members of the audience, that they knew exactly what he was talking about. You could tell that they recognised their colleagues in what he was saying, if not themselves. His set was full of verbal sketches and cartoons that brought the whole subject to life.

Teaching is something we have become familiar with in entertainment: from Grainge Hill and Byker Grove to the modern day school programmes, a succession of television writers have placed schools on our screens, along side hospitals, police stations and doctors surgeries, as something we all know about and given them a life, plots and dramas we can all easily relate to.

Far from being a series of professional 'in-jokes' for teachers, Kevin's material was easily accessible, even for someone like me, for whom school-days were a pre-historic experience, only dimly remembered.

Bang up to date? Yes. Commenting on the cuts, he suggested that the one thing that should be cut most was Michael Gove's throat, which brought guffas from the audience and a few cheers.

An hilarious romp through the ironies of modern day teaching.

Delightfully funny and thought provoking.

Artsin cornered Kevin after the show to find out more about this intriguing actor:

Artsin: Have you been doing this stuff for long, Kevin?

Kevin: This is about the twentieth time I have done this show, usually in arts centres and small venues.

Artsin: So how did you decided to be a stand-up comedian?

Kevin: I used to be into punk rock, following bands like the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and the Damned. I had a left-leaning view of the world. I thought it would be good to take a break from teaching. I was frustrated as a teacher and, being a bit of a show off, I was determined to carve out a career for myself as a stand up. I've been doing this full time for about five years, now.

Artsin: Have you played Leicester before?

Kevin: Yes, I like the kudos of the Leicester Comedy festival and I am also appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Thursday 10th February - The Exchange Bar

Fredrik Andersson and Tobias Persson

Fredrick (left) and Tobias (right)

If you haven't heard of The Exchange Bar before, it's probably because it's new; it's just across from CURVE theatre and within easy staggering distance of G-Spot club, so handy for after show activities.

Tonight we had two Swedish stand-ups; different! So we thought we would turn up and check them out.

Two original acts charmed the audience with their quirky, sharp observations and lightening wit. Tobias has been performing for about ten years in his native homeland. He is half Swedish and half Norwegian (but he declined to tell us which half was which.) In Scandinavia he is quite well known and works as a full-time comedian.

Fredrik told us he had been performing for about six years, as a stand-up and earlier this week they performed for students at the O2 Academy in Leicester. "We enjoyed that a lot", he told us.

These two young and likeable guys played to a full house (even though it was a damp Thursday night in Leicester, so well done!.)

Fredrick went on first and soon got into some witty quips. He noted that "Sweden is known for two things - suicide and Abba. Both of which are pretty much the same thing." Speaking in clear and understandable English, he explained how he has been invited by the church in Upsala to perform a gig. Although they were suspicious of his rude but hilarious sense of humour, he concluded that that the church was "... behind him on this", a phrase he returned to several times during the routine.

His low-key, rather laconic style was balanced with a rather dry but acerbic wit and he had a ready smile and a sparkle in his eyes that told you he was enjoying the show and trying make the English laugh.

Tobias was a little more animated; more funny postures and silly movements accompanied his routine. Like many British stand ups, his set was peppered with expletives and lots of lines about sex and taboo subjects like rape, disabilities and homosexuality, which our more street-wise acts tend to steer clear of ... but because they were from Sweden, people laughed it off.

I liked the joke about Sweden being populated with beautiful looking people; "we do have ugly people", he said, "but we keep them all in a camp" just outside Sweden. "It's called Norway". I recognised that one; a bit like the only jokes ever told by Lithuanians - always about the Poles.

Likeable, unusual and a first for them here at the Comedy festival. It's good that acts want to come a really long way to play on a damp Thursday night in a cellar in Leicester.

Tuesday 8th February - The Exchange Bar - Student stand-ups

I had actually gone down to the Exchange to see Norwegian comic Dag Soras. But he wasn't able to make it. But, nobody told me that. Not to worry, we had a lineup of local student comedians who put on some fairly funny offerings.

Martin England opened the show. He is studying at DMU and is noted for his story about nipple tassels, culminating in a surprise visual aide. Not quite up to Dan White's standards, but noval, nevertheless. He launched his set with an amusing series of anecdotes about how to get women. It was a stream of consciousness style of narrative, rather like the kind of conversations blokes have in pubs and certainly very much where a lot of stand-ups are coming from these days. Raw and funny, he got a warm response from the audience for this surreal tales.

Joe Wood told us he came from Portsmouth originally so I was intrigued to see what he had to say about my home town. I liked his quip about gates; he met a posh girl who complained that only one of her gates worked. "In Portsmouth we don't have gates", he replied, "and if you got one on Monday it would be gone by Friday.", Spot on! Comics these days rush in where angels fear to tread; his jokes about suicide bombers were in deliciously bad taste and very funny.

Now the Exchange Bar is one of those conversions that has tastefully retained the original ambience of the original Victorian building. Either that or they had run out of cash before the plasterers had finished. The basement had been given what designers love to call the 'distressed chique' look; following an appeal for furnishings, it had become home to Leicester's leading collection of 'pre-loved chairs'. Well, better than the sterile Ikea look of over the road. Individual and idiosyncratic, the converted cellar actually had quite a lot of atmosphere.

Another student David Murphy came on and talked about video games. His geeky appearance lent itself well to his material which was all about what you would imagine the average brainy teenager lives and breathes for: video games and girls (very much in that order) oh and of course mobile phones. Clearly some members of the audience understood what David was on about, though a lot of it went over my head. They did have telephones when when I was his age but they kept them in big red boxes in the street (except in Portsmouth of course where they just had the red boxes, on account of them being too heavy to nick.)

The gig finished with Andy Schooledge, slightly older and clearly a lot more experienced. All the students performed confidently, none of them froze and some were quite animated. They all tried their best to draw the audience into the act. Andy launched his routine with a narrative about Twitter. He worked the crowd rather more than most of the others. With more style and presence, due to his having been playing for over a year, the chirpy chappy came up with some hilarious lines.

The fairly full room emptied after a round of enthusiastic applause and that was it. Clearly, a lot of up and coming talent in Leicester.

Find out about the DMU Footlights Society.

Other pages you might like

Luke Wright and Byron Vincent - our reviews of their performances