"I blame you for me," Pam Ann (aka Caroline Reid) tells her fans. "You created this." You can see why Reid might try to dodge responsibility, and talk blame rather than gratitude: her camp, bitchy flight-attendant alter ego supplies comedy of the crudest and most obvious variety. Her crowd lap it up, but pickings are slim for the uninitiated, as Pam Ann offers endless lewd talk, does some funny Asian accents and labours to reanimate the corpses of airline industry stereotypes – Air France are snooty, flight attendants are promiscuous, easyJet passengers are riff-raff, and so on.
Tonight's running joke trades on the recent disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 – mainly to goad Asian (or Asian-looking) audience members and to milk the tenuous sexual innuendo of the phrase "black box". True, the misanthropic nymphomaniac shtick is purposefully provocative and Reid does raise a few smiles at the effrontery of her rudeness. Her dominatrix high-handedness, as she lavishes abuse on this punter or that imaginary passenger, can be striking, and her video interludes – such as the version of The Sound of Music into which she crudely inserts herself – land a few low blows.
But her humour is a blunt instrument, and two hours on its receiving end gets to be a deadening experience. There's a section, in the guise of flight attendant Lily, that offers a comedy oriental accent as its sole joke. This isn't so much global travel as time travel back to the days of Love Thy Neighbour. Latterly, there's a Kylie Minogue dance-along to flatter Pam Ann's mainly gay crowd. There are changes of costume and fabulous wigs – but the change the show most needs, to Reid's comedy of casual smut and insult, never arrives.
