Perhaps it's no surprise that there's a dated feel to Jasper Carrott's new show, a highlights package of stories and sketches cherry-picked from a 30-year career. This is mild observational comedy, with which the Brummie comic forges an everyman bond with his adoring local crowd. But it's one thing to share the concerns of the man in the street, it's quite another when it seems as if he's written half your jokes.
Not that Birmingham's bothered. Carrott has shifted 70,000 tickets for this run, and his success is easy to understand. He's supremely at ease on stage. There are no props, no mic stand even, to impede his casual pacing to and fro, punctuated by goggle-eyed gawps at the supposed eccentricities of the modern world. He's at his best when he works this middle-English exasperation to near absurdity, as in his celebrated sketch (screened here in cartoon form) about the lengths he goes to to exterminate a garden mole. "If I ever caught it," he howls, "I'd bury it alive!"
There's nothing remotely mean-spirited about his comedy. But there's nothing provocative either. "Are you rebels?" he demands of his audience at the top of the show. But his idea of rebellion is to stick a £1 coin up his nose - or to tell us: "You can set light to a fart. You can!" He tells a story about how awestruck he was to meet Princess Di. This isn't comedy as subversion, nor even surprise. It's comedy as coercive consensuality. "I've got a dotty aunt," he'll say. "We've all got dotty aunts." It trades in Daily Mail orthodoxies: foreign food is funny, today's teenagers are oversexed.
These routines have been voted for by ticket-buyers, and are culled from as early as the 1970s. A certain datedness may be inevitable: witness the Doris Stokes jokes. It's not Carrott's fault that the brand of quirky observational stand-up he helped pioneer has run out of steam. But it's hard to watch his cosy Best Of show without thinking: less Carrott, please, and more stick.
· Until January 17. Box office: 0870 909 4144.
