It's been a pleasure to watch Wil Hodgson's ascent from off-the-radar Fringe oddball to comedy big-hitter, accomplished without compromising in the slightest his anti-mainstream sensibility. He is still a podgy, pink-haired punk from Chippenham, deploying his distinctly un-Johnny Rottenesque west-country vowels to savage laddism and sing the praises of My Little Pony.
That's not as twee as it sounds; this teddy bear-loving ex-wrestler neither exaggerates nor apologises for his improbable identity, but merely reports on the scrapes it leads him into while getting about his business in a small, and sometimes small-minded, Wiltshire town.
His act is not substantially different to when he won the Perrier best newcomer award in 2004. The subjects are the same: youth subcultures, soft toys, the horrors of Nuts magazine - of aggression and fake sex and testosterone. There's a tender-hearted paean here, implausible though it may sound, to Readers' Wives, the warts-and-all rebel against porn's silicone-enhanced orthodoxy, which is "what Ken Loach would make if he made a grot mag." Hodgson is disgusted by the airbrushed fantasia of modern sex, and its un-sensual, unreal pin-ups. "I'd climb over Paris Hilton to get to Fern Britton," he says - "should such an unlikely scenario present itself." Coupling with Hilton, he says, would be "like having sex with a giant Toblerone that you'd dipped in Ronseal."
I'm totally attuned to Hodgson's alternative sensibility, to his loyalty to the underdog. I couldn't approve more of his attack on the snobbery implicit in the word "chav". If I'm not laughing more, maybe it's because Hodgson's delivery (immeasurably improved in the three years since his debut) could do with more modulation, more changes of pitch and pace. And there's some material here, including a routine about the disillusioning day that Roland Rat visited Chippenham, that gives less effective vent to Hodgson's anti-establishment spleen.
But this is still the show to see for a celebration of dissidence and a leopardskin loafer directed at the macho idiocies of the modern world.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
