Joe Pasquale, Weymouth Pavilion, Monday July 27

Squeaky-voiced Joe bounds onto the stage resplendent in an electric blue suit embroidered with red roses. He kisses and hugs many of the brave souls who have occupied the front row.

Then he proceeds to bat marshmallows into the audience and tries to get us to throw them back into a net attached to his head.

It’s great knockabout clowning around stuff full of manic energy. Unfortunately this is the only really funny part of the evening and lasts just five minutes.

He leaves the stage after introducing his support act Paul Burling a very loud, overlong and not very funny impressionist who tells us several times he has been on Britain’s Got Talent (he didn’t win). He does impressions of characters from TV shows either no one remembers or ones we wish we’d forgotten. His impressions are pretty good though. Harry Hill in particular is spot on, but he’s quite overbearing in his delivery and fails to rouse the audience.

Thankfully Joe returns after a 20-minute interval and does some impressive magic card tricks, but his jokes and anecdotes are cringeworthy and typically rely on innuendo or scatological references for easy laughs.

Despite coming across as a cuddly comedian Joe singles out a man in the front row and bullies him into doing a silly dance for not participating in the synchronised clapping. Glad I wasn’t in the front row. He also seems to like humiliating people in the audience for their looks or lack of hair.

When he gets three shame-faced members of the audience to join him on stage for a trick it all becomes a bit uncomfortable and slightly distasteful when he starts to sniff them and ends up licking a poor woman’s neck!

At one point Joe brings his stooge on stage -- a simpleton dressed in just giant Y-fronts – dragging the show further down a pit of abject stupidity. Laughter comes more from embarrassment than genuine humour.

The finale of the show is just weird. Joe paints an upside down black and white representation of what turns out to be (when righted) Jack Nicholson in The Shining -- one of cinemas most iconic images of pure evil -- whilst singing Windmills of Your Mind. He then presents the picture to the woman he licked earlier. A strange momento of a bizarre show.

GRAHAM JAMES