Terry Alderton is a surrealist stand-up. His show is a frenetic jumble of bizarre jokes and tangents – he opens his set miming and dancing along to Punjabi music and deliberately continues until after the audience has stopped laughing. He then throws himself into the madness of his show, which includes him spending a good five minutes rewinding to an earlier point in his set, singing a duet with a call-centre worker, impersonating monsters while classical music plays, repeatedly hiding behind a girder and conversing self-consciously about how the set is going with a throaty-voiced alter-ego.The problem with surrealist material is that it falls flat about as often as it works, and the line between continuing a joke long enough for it to become funny again and merely continuing a joke longer after all humour has been extracted is a thin one. Despite his almost boundless energy, the pace of the show often suffers. Still, when the material works there is nothing quite like it and it’s among the funniest material to be seen at the Fringe. For example, a conversation between Terry’s shoes is, quite frankly, genius. Terry Alderton is among the stranger acts at the Fringe and if you feel like something surreal then you could do considerably worse.
