The Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year competition has had a good run when picking winners recently. As well as spotting the likes of Josh Widdicombe and Jason Manford, Romesh Ranganathan only won the competition in 2013 and has had a positively meteoric rise. This year’s winner might take a little longer to end up all over your TV screens, but he is so horribly young he has plenty of time to make it. And he surely will.
First up on the night was Rob Mullholland, a 6 foot 7 inch beanpole in skinny jeans and tweed jacket who immediately earnt brownie points by not apologising for looking like a stretched Jarvis Cocker. Mulholland struggled a bit drawing the short straw and going first, but the crowd gradually warmed up. He lost brownie points for a series of dick jokes but then won them back with interest with a routine about comparing having a baby to getting a kitten. Mulholland impressed the judges (including me) enough to earn third place and he certainly has funny bones.
Next up was comedy competition regular Yuriko Kotani. One of the problems of judging a lot of competitions is you start to see the same faces doing the same acts, but this time Kotani appeared to have updated her material and has built further on her culture clash observations. She seemed slightly thrown when early on someone shouted something out but she is becoming an increasingly confident, relaxed performer. And her routine about there being no Japanese equivalent of “ish” is definitely a winning routine, just not on this night when she was up against stiff opposition.
Ed Patrick was a performer who was both predictable and surprising. Wth his fluffy/spiky hair and casual clothes he looked like he could easily fall into the Russell Howard/Chris Ramsey student-y camp, but then it turned out that he was a doctor, which meant that he had some topical Jeremy Hunt-bashing material to get his teeth into as well as reasonably sophisticated gags about sticking his finger up patients’ bottoms. I don’t quite know how Patrick finds the time for comedy given the long days doctors work, but he is certainly good enough to make a career switch. If I was him I’d ditch medicine and do stand-up. I’m sure the money is better and the hours are certainly shorter.
Nigel Ng closed the first half with a tight set based around the differences between his native Malaysia, America where he has spent time, and the UK. Ng is another comedy competition regular and has plenty of good lines, observing that in America he is described as “Asian” while in the UK that category is already taken so he ends up being called "Chinese" here. Like Kotani he is a keen observer of how English is used differently in different countries. Asked how he would like his burger cooked, Ng’s immediate thought was not “rare” or “medium” but “to the best of your ability”.
Review continues here.
