Time: 5.45pm
Capacity: Small. 60 seats with 45 people in them.
The theme: "Powershow!" Why Tom Bell and Ed Weeks decided to call 2008's bundle of surreal sketches by this name is never made clear. By the end, however, Powershow! takes on a life of its own, in the rather literal manner that anyone who saw Superman 3 as a child will shudder to remember.
High point: Few since Spike Milligan have had Weeks and Bell's ability to seek out the switches in reality and flip us into unexpected comic universes. Pining for his former girlfriend, for instance, Bell forces his companion to connect to the internet with his guitar and play her emails. Halfway through the show, moreover, they suddenly turn off all the lights to take a nap. "I don't get the whole top-and-tail thing," grumbles Weeks as they settle down together. "Our genitals are still adjacent." Good laughs like these are still rare pleasures while sketch comedy continues to languish in the twin oubliettes of student revue and BBC joke-blindness. (For which Catherine Tate, Mitchell and Webb and Little Britain, you owe us all an apology).
Weak spot: This year's sketches, unfortunately, are frequently not as funny as the incidental comments that surround them. Weeks and Bell make an extremely likable double act, and their formal inventiveness is a pleasure to behold, but too often the main body of their show seems to get left behind. The final drama especially, involving their battle with the show itself, is both clever and ingeniously staged, but never really gives us anything to laugh at.
Audience participation: An abusive singalong on the sexual inadequacies of Bell, and a man in the corner who thought he saw a ghost. It was a false alarm.
Comic equation: Morecambe and Wise to the power of Reeves and Mortimer
Mark out of 10: 6
Put this on your poster: Contains scenes of cruelty to fruit that some viewers may find amusing.
