Sketch Off Final
Leicester Square Festival, London
 

DESPITE the crisis in the arts, Britain has a never-ending supply of fresh weirdos. Some come straight from their university improv clubs, and some are doing their recovery in public after a year of being brutalised at infamous French clowning school Gaulier.

And some are here because their anarchic spirit allows them to belong nowhere else.

And many end up in the heats of Sketch Off, a competition dominated by character comedians, with the odd sketch act who surprise everyone by actually winning on occasion, like last year’s Burger + a Pint, who reprise their joyously stupid skits here while the judges make up their minds.

We’re a long way from Live At The Apollo and interchangeable telly panel shows here, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Our excellent host, Sam Nicoresti, makes it clear neither fame nor fortune await tonight’s winners. She also has an excellently sideways approach to audience interaction, through which we learn a great deal about mid-comedy night fruit consumption etiquette (kick them out, I say).

The winner of the competition, Sam Eley, performed as Basil Crumbwick, in a giant papier-mache head; Crumbwick (pictured) is a grotesque echo of Frank Sidebottom, obsessed with anuses but throwing out one-liners almost worthy of Simon Munnery.

Our runners-up were extremely worthy too — Luke Nixon’s tragic, doomed teacher Jim Midge got some of the biggest laughs of the night, and Nikola McMurtrie’s Thomas The Tank Engine-themed six minutes somehow taking in a dance routine, doomed love and a comment on the current state of the railways.

Many of the non-winners also deserve a mention.

Big Boys start us off as suitably anarchic pseudo-Italian clerics. A physically distinctive duo, they buttress each other’s quirks into a cathedral of pleasing nonsense.

Hannah Whyte’s Roger Prick is a character from another age, a soft porn Alan Patridge stumbling his way through 2025’s mores.

And Jess Carrivick’s Cassandra Della Treebourne is a character out of time; part terrible jazz singer, part comedy-spectacled raconteur, she’s the sort of person you could well imagine being interviewed by Clive James or Dame Edna and absolutely believing she’s real.

Overall, this was an excellent night of alternative comedy, with a comradely, collaborative energy, and a feeling that all these people will keep making special and strange things until the moon falls in the sea or the BBC stop recommissioning Have I Got News For You, whichever happens sooner.