Michael McPheat @ Gilded Balloon Patter House

Shows set at a very high emotional pitch have become such a standard at this festival that it’s almost become bolder to run in the opposite direction. So while some will search their Fringe programmes for the zaniest show descriptions, how about this for the most banal: Michael McPheat's Fringe show bills itself as an “immersive comedy show about Milton Keynes shopping centre”.

In it, we find McPheat mounting a surprisingly impassioned defense of his hometown, hoping to save it from its fate as one of the nation’s “geographical punchlines”. We’ll get a potted history of this planned utopia, reflections on a childhood by turns idyllic and mind-numbing, and, yes, jokes about urban planning, roundabouts and gridded road layouts. If the latter sounds dull, it isn’t: McPheat has set himself a task of writing funnily about a not particularly funny place, and he succeeds. Along the way, he draws on his experience as an interior designer and edges into gentle raptures as he sings the shopping centre’s theme song (it’s real!), digs into its grand inspirations (via Milan and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and has something serious to say about the nation’s suburban soul as he says the centre “raised me” and “felt like church”.

Along the way, it’s not all Milton Keynes: there’s gear in here too about Grand Designs, true crime podcasts, and the twisted relationship expectations of a generation taught sex ed by The Sims. McPheat’s joke writing may not be consistently novel, and he may rely a little too much on behavioural punctuation to make gags land, but this is a smart performer trying and succeeding to do something just a little different. And your heart will, we’re sure, be warmed by a concluding passage that makes clear that all this loving-Milton-Keynes stuff is really no joke for McPheat.

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Michael McPheat is BRUTAL!, Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Snug), until 31 Aug, 3.30pm, £11-£13