"No more than the ordinary lactose tolerant person"

RICHARD HERRING / TOM BINNS / GARY BELL / RHODRI RHYS, 22ND MARCH 2005, CHEEKY MONKEY COMEDY CLUB, KINGS HEATH

Tonight's compere Dave recalls a heckler labelling him "Ronnie O'Sullivan ... in a hall of mirrors". Harsh but fair. My first thought is of an even fatter Mickey Quinn (former Portsmouth and Newcastle hero, for those of you not acquainted with one of football's more colourful characters). Either way, he's rotund and jovial, warming things up nicely for the arrival of the first act.

Rhodri Rhys is a well-spoken Welshman (no, really, how did you guess?) who claims the Vikings took one look at the women when they got to the Welsh border and opted to stick to pillaging alone. Perhaps overly confident given the strength of his material, he nevertheless raises a few laughs.

Second act Gary Bell is a more unlikely success. A barrister by day, he's dressed soberly in jumper and shirt and, together with his slightly unkempt squall of hair, he looks every bit like Boris Johnson's cousin. This ten-minute slot is only his sixth gig, but he's a remarkably assured performer with a nice line in dry satirical comment: Camilla Parker-Bowles is, he claims, "the most offensive thing I've seen on the arm of a royal prince". He also suggests we should just tell David Blunkett we've introduced ID cards, and if he asks to see them we can just produce our Blockbuster cards...

Tom Binns starts very promisingly indeed, with a segment based on a hospital radio DJ that owes something to Peter Kay and Steve Coogan: "That was Whitney Houston with 'Where Do Broken Hearts Go' - well, there's a furnace out the back..." He then mentions a song request for a self-harmer: Rod Stewart's 'The First Cut Is The Deepest'. It's just a shame that Binns - a contributing writer for 'Trigger Happy TV' and Kerrang! radio DJ who used to present 'RI:SE' and also appeared in 'Fist Of Fun' and Partridge's 'Knowing Me Knowing Yule' - loses his way quite so dramatically after this and it fizzles out into something of a damp squib.

As strange as it was seeing Stewart Lee in the small upstairs room of a pub in Sutton Coldfield, it's even stranger seeing his former partner Richard Herring in the small back room of a pub in Kings Heath, performing on a low stage in front of an ill-hung curtain and an assortment of horse-brasses. Herring is, after all, a comedy legend, as Dave helpfully reminds us before announcing the final act's arrival on stage.

To be fair, Herring has cut his cloth accordingly, and looks every bit the sort of comic who should be performing in the small back rooms of pubs in Kings Heath on low stages in front of ill-hung curtains and assortments of horse-brasses - his hair is long, his jacket is of black leather and, most important of all, his shirt is loud.

Herring might begin with the fairly standard stand-up fare of graffiti - and, more specifically, graffiti in toilets - but it's what he does with it that marks him out as a cut above the other performers. Breezing through some fine material vaguely familiar from old installments of Warming Up, he arrives at his tale of being mistaken for some kind of perverted yoghurt fetishist by a supermarket checkout assistant who, upon seeing the contents of his shopping basket, announced "Someone likes yoghurt".

Indeed, yoghurt-related material makes up almost the entire remainder of the set, as he laughs off the idea that he goes around different supermarkets buying nine yoghurts in each "so as not to arouse suspicion" and insists he's never once filled a bath full of yoghurt and rubbed it into his "anal cleft". It's testimony to his talents that he can turn this most trivial of incidents into comedy gold, and keep an audience half expecting a cascade of knob gags laughing hard throughout.

If there's one disappointment, it's the short duration of his set. I could have listened to him go on about dairy-based desserts for at least another half hour.

(Incidentally, full marks to the DJ who, during one of the intervals, saw fit to subject the audience to Ciccone Youth's 'Into The Groove(y)'. Good work, sir.)

Link:

Cheeky Monkey Comedy Club. The site includes a link to an extraordinarily comprehensive list of comedians' biogs - a very handy resource.