Honesty's important in stand-up; so's making stuff up, obviously, but audiences can generally sniff out if the person on stage doesn't – at least for that moment – believe in what they're saying. So, Londoner Kirsty Marsh and Welsh-born Blod Jones are perhaps wise from the off to admit that their show is still very much 'a work in progress', that they're trying things out in front of a live audience just to see how it goes, to hone it either for hometown of London or for the Fringe next year. It's the kind of thing that the 'free' model allows people to do.
Alas, much of this show, at least as it stands, just doesn't work; not least when the pair – and Marsh in particular – stray from the core idea of the show, which is essentially sharing some of the weirdness that both their dads have done down the years: dressing up as Santa in the summer; wandering round a hotel naked, or choosing a rather inappropriate online dating profile name.
Some of the pair's anecdotes are genuinely amusing, but they too often lack a good punchline and stand like islands amid the still waters of turns about Jones' ginger hair and the things Marsh would like to do to George Osborne. There's also an unsettling distancing effect thanks to the pair, for the most part, referring to their fathers by their first names, rather than just 'Dad'. Perhaps it's necessary for Marsh and Jones because they don't want audiences to confuse the two, but it doesn't help build the fundamental relationship between the pair on stage and their subject. Also, including some of the odd things Marsh's 'father-in-law' has done seems a bit of a cheat, and hardly worth the effort given it's really little more than pointing at him and going: 'Isn't that a little bit odd?'
On the plus side, Marsh and Jones are reasonably good at reacting to their audience; on the day of this review, they played quite well against some of its younger members – essentially presenting themselves as a warning about not what not to do with their lives. Whether that included putting on a lunchtime show on the Free Festival, however, wasn't clear.
