Australian comedian Caroline Reid is becoming quite a festive fixture as the air hostess with the mostest, Pam Ann. Her new show, The Sky's the Limit, is her third consecutive seasonal offering; like a Christmas cracker, it is gaudily packaged, contains cheap gags and leaves you with a ringing in your ears.
The first act features Reid's Chinese check-in assistant, Lilly, passing tart comments as a queue of punters nervously volunteer their tickets. The jokes - Lilly is paranoid about terrorists, bitchy about women and flirty with men - amuse for the first handful of "passengers", but are repeated until this short routine begins to seem rather a long haul. It is followed by an enjoyable promo video for Pam Ann's One World Alliance network of carriers, including snooty BA (whose hostess morphs into a horse) and slobby easyJet, at which Reid, once in character as Pam Ann, takes facile pot-shots all evening.
Sometimes all the in-jokes make the show feel like an airline industry social. I dare say the words "Terminal Four" are hilarious to professional trolley dollies, of whom there are several in the crowd. But they're about as amusing as terminal illness if you don't know what Pam Ann is talking about.
For most of the second half, though, the opposite is the case: the show has nothing to do with air travel. Instead Pam, swaddled in spangly PVC, hosts a raucous game show in which audience members must fake orgasms (excruciatingly) and lip-synch to popular songs. It's not so much funny as silly - or plain bizarre, as when a middle-aged pathologist from Leicester mimes Madonna's Like a Prayer while wearing a wimple and flanked by two prancing hoofers.
Reid's skills as a ringmaster of this mayhem are more in evidence than her comedic ability. Her jokes are economy-class, and the material as thin as airline food. The Sky's the Limit taxis in strange patterns across the runway, but it never looks like taking off.
· Until January 28. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
