It’s been a good year for Kevin Bridges which really kick-started last year when most of the British nation first saw him on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow. Since then he’s been on numerous TV panel and stand up shows, sold out entire runs at the Edinburgh Fringe, and enabled him to embark on a solo tour of Britain’s theatres.

And so he found himself in Poole.

He was a little slow to start off with, joking with the audience that he was his own warm up act and that the first half would be him warming up, and sometimes it did feel like never a truer word spoken in jest. The first half wielded quite a few lulls in the lols, one of the best bits coming when he started chatting to a late comer (Mike), who was a Rover driving music producer (“although not a great one if you’re driving a Rover”).

He got heckled a lot during the first half, especially by an elderly couple in the front row who seemed to just want to be a part of the act, and whilst most comedians would have acknowledged the heckle and carried on with their set, Bridges decided he wanted to chat to the hecklers. This didn’t work. Large parts of it weren’t funny and ultimately led to him forgetting where he’d got to before he was heckled, breaking the flow of whatever routine he’d been doing.

If this was a game of football, the commentator would certainly have used the phrase “it’s a game of two halves” because the second half of the show was blindingly good (although that might just have been due to the bar being set low in the first half). He still got a few heckles, but this time he did acknowledge and carried on with his set and it really paid off.

Going from his rites of passage as a boy with his dad, involving late night Sky TV (back in the late 90s), to why a terrorist would have problems hijacking a plane full of drunk, holiday-bound Scots, the laughs just piled on.

The weird thing about Kevin was when he tried pressing a punter for more information, and tried to chat with them more, it didn’t really work, but when he dealt with them in passing, and not trying so hard to talk to the audience, he was on fire with absolute razor-sharp wit. He perhaps needs to stick to what he’s best at for the time being and work on getting some real interaction as time goes by, afterall, he’s only 23!

SL

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