Live At The Apollo

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TV review: Live At The Apollo

Make sure to put Live At The Apollo on record, as this series looks set to be the best yet.

Nina Conti - lately of Family Tree and the only reason you will ever need to use the words "amusing ventriloquist" - comperes this final episode of the standup comedy series. Conti specialises in a kind of elaborate, mechanical audience participation, and here she introduces acts of a similarly high polish. Jimeoin (latecomers: you say "Jim Owen") will reprise his gentle and not enormously surprising range of observational material, while Rob Beckett offers an amiable take on class.

Ventriloquist Nina Conti brings the current crop of comedy sets to a close tonight as she pulls her faithful Monkey out of a straw bag to help her host the show.

Also taking their turns in the spotlight are class-obsessed Londoner Rob Beckett and English-born Northern Irish joker Jimeoin.

The audience also gets a chance to take a starring role, as cheeky puppet master Conti yanks on their strings for a spot of puppet-based participatory entertainment.

Radio Times review

Picking someone out of the audience to help with your act can be hit and miss. But Nina Conti gets really lucky when she asks a person in the front row to be her new puppet. The woman she chooses is an absolute natural, although to give Conti her due, it's a very, very clever idea.

She's followed by Jimeoin, who does such a spot-on impersonation of a catwalk model he could do it for a living if the comedy didn't work out. Then sarf-Londoner Rob Beckett takes to the stage with some nice observations on his childhood. But it's Conti and her new assistant who steal the show.

Radio Times review

Is it me or has Jack Whitehall overdone it a bit lately? The plummy comic is everywhere you look - panel games, sitcoms, chat shows (several of each), comedy awards, plus his own show on BBC Three with his dad. He has become inescapable. (Anyone would think he had a book out for Christmas.)

Here, in an edition postponed from December, he kicks off the bombastic stand-up show with a frantic routine about his experience with a cheese strudel on a German airline. It's not in itself hilarious and in lesser hands could fall flat but Whitehall powers it home through sheer, over-caffeinated energy.

Then Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan gets things going with a much better routine: her impression of Beyoncé going to the grocery store is worth seeing.

Radio Times review

If the last act tonight, Terry Alderton, looks familiar, that may be because you've seen him as Bianca's taxi-driving boyfriend in EastEnders. But he was a comedian before he was an actor - and before that he was a goalkeeper for Southend United. He has also presented the National Lottery - it's quite a CV - and his stand-up is resolutely left-field: at one stage he stands on his head and acts out a conversation between his two shoes.

Before Alderton we're on safer ground with host Adam Hills, who does a brilliant job of forming a boy band from members of the audience. He's not always laugh-out-loud funny, but something about Hills' act makes you feel better about life.

Sean Lock shimmying across the dance floor, Strictly style, sporting a black nylon shirt open to the waist, is the jolly flight of fancy that opens tonight's laughter line-up. Young comedian Romesh Ranganathan brings his Asian DNA into play with a scurrilously hilarious take on racism and a creative approach to telling off other people's kids, which leaves Marcus Brigstocke to supply a cheeky clutch of gags on ageing, safaris, the Greek economy - and some beatboxing.

Host Sean Lock emerges from the clouds of dry ice looking as dapper as always, before launching into a routine about the risks, as a middle-aged man, of ever mentioning that you quite like something. Particularly around this time of year, he points out, expressing a passing interest in anything - a ferry, a bird - can result in ill-advised "experience" presents come Christmas Day.

Lock's longer routines are always good (there's a great one on the discrimination you suffer as a binge drinker), but his quick hits are good, too, including a dark, throwaway one-liner about hearing voices.

Following the host, Asian comic Romesh Ranganathan talks about how, because he has mixed-race kids, he and his wife try to get the kids to pick a side. Then Marcus Brigstocke explains the euro crisis by means of a nightclub allegory and some passable beatboxing. It's as plausible as anything on Newsnight.

Jack Dee heads another strong line-up in the stand-up showcase, his deadpan patter more than holding its own against the binge-drinking riffing of observational comedian Seann Walsh and a barrage of witty snippets from Milton Jones, acknowledged master of the one-liner. The only problem is, the 30-minute running time feels a bit rushed - this is one show that deserves some extra time to play with.