Footlights in 'Wishful Thinking'

One of the first sketches in the Footlights' latest offering features two beachcombers. One is a master who chances upon neolithic arrowheads, the other a no-hoper who comes up with pebbles. The loser plucks item after feeble item from a box, patronised all the while by his more accomplished friend – until he comes to his final find. "Bet it's a severed head", I think – and sure enough there begins a discussion of what to do with the discovered cranium.

This is the problem with 'Wishful Thinking': you always know when there's a head in the box. The actors—heirs to an illustrious heritage of Cambridge comics—are good enough to inject surreal wit into even the less-promising scenarios; but the punchlines rarely make the most of the set-up.

This is less noticeable in the shorter sketches that make up the much funnier first half of the show – although too many of these go out with a whimper rather than a bang. But the laughs dwindle as the show winds up, with two longer sketches that simply refuse to end. A weirdly parochial tale of betrayal among a household of gossipy coke-dealers might be a brilliant sketch at half the length, while a Fawltyish wedding farce has enough ingredients stuffed into it in the way of hiccups, dead cats and pregnancy tests to keep the audience giggling.

But both labour for ages before arriving at the conclusion, which is in neither case funny enough to justify the time spent getting there.