Olivia Lee's Naughty Bits

If anyone was in any doubt of the charm and talent of Olivia Lee, a cool 30 minutes in front of Channel 4s Comedy Lab on Thursday evening would have proven without a shadow that this girl is the hottest British female comic out there.

Deliciously flakey, clever and just bloody funny, Olivia spent the 30 minutes engaging members of the public in her fantastic sketches as if she too is a real - if slightly deranged - member of the public complete with hidden cameras.

The delectable Olivia has brought us a new interpretation of the sketch show, Trigger Happy TV-style, and if you get the chance to catch a repeat, it comes highly recommended from Quintessential Comedy.

It's frankly genius, and a full series simply has to be commissioned.

Smile - you're on Candid Camera? Not bleedin' likely if the whole nation is laughing at you. You had to feel for the victims in Olivia Lee's Naughty Bits, particularly the chap she cornered in a bathroom showroom, claiming to be his girlfriend. She wanted to know why he had a problem with intimacy, and interrogated his many failings. The guy looked on bemused: he didn't know that Lee was a comedian with an arsenal of hidden cameras. He took her intrusion in good spirit. That was admirable: there are so many crazy people out there, one's natural reaction might have been to call the police.

Lee's show works on a brilliant premise though - that Carrie Bradshaw is the most annoying person on the planet. So Lee's character, desperately searching for love, mad and delusional, stalks men in a deranged quest to find Mr Right. The mickey-taking of Carrie is easily the funniest thing, even if it is one-note: Lee bashes away on a kid's typewriter play-set, witlessly musing on what she has done wrong so far and what she can do to snare her ideal man.

This was very very funny, if you find Carrie to be beyond irritating and never more so than in those scenes in Sex and the City where she lies on her bed asking the dumbest of questions in voiceover: So I got to thinking... Like Carrie, Lee's character runs about in diaphanous dresses with huge appliquéd rosettes. She just needs a bus to splash her.

The great British public seem worryingly at ease with a woman assailing them and acting insanely. One lady kindly lent her make-up, which Lee used to make herself look like a cat. A guy in a sofa shop had to put up with her acting out being his girlfriend. A doctor collared by her elderly Jewish momma incarnation (Bubba Barbara, desperate to marry off her daughter), was left scratching his head when both women ran off when he revealed he was married - and therefore unsuitable.

Perhaps this is one of the positive outcomes of reality shows and living with CCTV cameras on every street corner: everyone thinks they're on TV all the time so behaves utterly nonchalantly in bizarre situations. A special mention to the shopkeepers who remained so equable when Lee went in with a toaster with what she insisted was a faulty hard drive. It's a toaster, one of the men repeated. She left, muttering about feeling patronised.

Interview with Olivia Lee

The London Paper asks Olivia some questions.

Olivia Lee is the pretty blonde practical joker from Balls of Steel who would try to interview minor celebrities holding a dildo as if it were a microphone. This new solo hidden-camera show gives her more room to expand, so to speak, and is themed around Sex and the City, with Olivia wandering around London in a frou-frou like some deranged, better-looking Sarah Jessica Parker putting members of the public in loony scenarios in showrooms, parks and a rap bar. There are some nice ideas, but as ever the supposed victims are too savvy and good-humoured and the gags tend to deflate.