Chris Neill's Got a Bun in the Oven

Cookery is currently plastered across the television screens and celebrity chefs are ripe for having the piss taken out of them. Unfortunately, Chris Neill falls into the trap of concentrating too much on a promising gimmick and never really backing it up with either enough dedication to the big joke or enough enthusiasm for the small ones.

His rather crowded stage sports a mock up of a common kitchen with the additional wow factor of a working stove, as Neil continuously reminds the audience as he slowly begins to prepare the edible punch-line to his act. Plodding across a fair range of food related humour, Neil produces a smooth performance with at least some semblance of style.

But while he is amusing, he is not much more than that, and hackneyed jokes about vegetarianism are only some of the more clichéd material in a not very original set. Worse than the tired jokes, the real low for Neil comes as he is upstaged by the three young men he invites up to taste the end product of his cooking. Their theatrical fork play is funnier than most of his jokes.

At least the resulting Devil’s Chicken Liver which he finally hands around the audience is tasty. If he concentrates a little more on the cooking and little less on the humour then he might pose a threat to Ainsley Harriet’s stewardship of Ready Steady Cook. He certainly doesn’t pose a threat to comics at this year’s Festival.