Lee Mack
UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, London WC1, and touring
Fresh from recording the first US series of ITV's The Sketch Show alongside Kelsey Grammer, Bafta-winner Lee Mack is now famous enough to warrant his own biopic. His live show, currently touring the UK, with stops in Paris and Milan, opens with a short film (with cameos from Harry Hill and Dan Antopolski) documenting his rise to fame as the country's leading seven-year-old stand-up - 'cheeky but never blue' - and his downward spiral through sherbet addiction, billing the show that follows as his comeback gig. It's a nice introduction, though entirely unrelated to any of the material that follows, but this hardly matters: Mack is an old-fashioned stand-up, in the sense that he offers an hour's worth of fast and energetic set pieces, any one of which could be extracted without losing anything.
He falters a little when he tries to riff off the audience, largely because of their reluctance to shout out in a big theatre (a recurrent problem for stand-ups transferring to bigger venues), but some of the material - his 'Twelve Days of Christmas' piece, for example - prompts applause for the sheer breathless panache of the delivery. He's an astute observer of behaviour - after one joke about a woman wearing a bindi, he adds 'she was white, don't worry' - and he uses his gawky frame to good slapstick effect. Mack's show is like a good pub roast dinner; you wouldn't call it ground-breaking or cutting-edge, but it is satisfying and immensely enjoyable.
