"Do you poop and scoop, Wembley?" Let it never be said that Alan Carr (pictured) aimed high with this, his first standup tour in four years. Carr knows his demographic – he starts by comparing his show to X-Factor loser Cher Lloyd ("there'll be some good bits and some bad bits") and stays at that level for the next two hours. But if the subject matter is workaday, at least he animates it with colourful phrasemaking and an array of facial expressions that make John Inman look deadpan.
As with Lee Evans last week, there's a sense that – as Carr ticks off budget flights, vajazzling, self-service checkouts and so on – his material might have been focus-grouped to appeal to a mass audience. The show skips between subjects, leaving nothing substantial in its wake. But if Carr keeps it light, it's not at the expense of memorable laugh-lines. I cherished the verucca sock in the hot tub, "popping up like a fin in Jaws"; and the image of Carr manhandling his dog to surf the internet – the canine having swallowed his wireless mouse.
Of course, Carr responds to all these events with high-pitched squawks of indignation. But the joke is always on himself: on his prissiness and vanity, his short-sightedness and (early) middle-aged spread. Given his success, this might ring falsely modest. But Carr emerges here as a man with a keen sense of his own ridiculousness, instilled by the unglamorous first 30 years of his life and now unlikely to be dislodged.
Likability is in the bag, then. It's substance and focus that are lacking in a show that darts about as directionlessly as a cursor controlled by a mouse-swallowing mutt.
