Showstopper! The Improvised Musical

Showstopper! and Mark Gatiss win Olivier Awards

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical has won the Best Entertainment and Family Show at the Olivier Awards tonight. Mark Gatiss won Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

Radio 4's Showstopper is a new programme in which a musical is improvised on the spot, from audience suggestions. A straightforward transfer of Showstopper's Edinburgh show, it's all lickety-split smart and, supposedly, hilarious. This week we got The Godsister, a mafia musical set in a Chicago malt shop. Lots of scare-the-baby singing, but my sides remained unsplit.

One always needs a dose of originality after a large helping of nostalgia and that was certainly provided by Showstopper, a new comedy show during which a cast improvises a musical using suggestions from the studio audience. Curtain up on the first offering, and Dylan Emery was asking the ensemble for an opening number for a musical called The God Sister set in mafia gangland. Not surprisingly, the plot was nonsensical at times, or as Emery put it, "contextually unlikely", but on the whole the performers - including Pippa Evans, Ruth Bratt, Lucy Trodd, Sean McCann and Oliver Senton - produced one of the most entertaining half hour's radio I've heard in a long time.

Radio review: Showstoppers

This 'improvised musical' had plenty of energy, but the music was a mess, the plot was non-existent and the comedy was weak.