Sporting Leo Sayer hair, tinted round-lens specs and a Cheshire Cat smile, Carl Donnelly is an eminently likeable 28-year-old blessed with the natural off-beat London wit of Noel Fielding without the high surrealism. He also shares Fielding's (and Rory McGrath's, and Victoria Wood's) tendency to laugh at his own jokes as soon as they leave his mouth, something I've always found fantastically annoying but maybe that's just me. A reformed horrible bastard from Tooting now settled in Wimbledon, Donnelly riffs brilliantly with the audience, to the point that he repeatedly has to restrain himself and get on with the actual set (he'd make an excellent panel show team captain).Once up and running, he ruminates on married life, his past brushes with the police and, most interestingly, fame. His reflections on the latter are more nuanced than, say, Ricky Gervais', perhaps because Donnelly is on the threshold of stardom rather than a fully paid-up member and has already stared into the jaws of the beast. He speaks with real honesty and humility about the pilot for an ill-fated Channel 4 TV show he co-hosted with Charlotte Church, which contained one round called 'Gay or Foreign' (perhaps best for all concerned, as Donnelly suggests, that it never saw the light of day). He also defends recent media scapegoats John Terry and Jack Whitehall with eloquence and rationality.Indeed, for all his shambolic meandering (Donnelly claimed that this was the least slick show of the run), there is a lovely open-mindedness, versatility and perspicacity that courses through the veins of the set and, despite stories about pots of shit and farting on trains, Donnelly has an everyman otherness seasoned with self-awareness and empathy that make him very difficult to resist. I just wish he'd stop laughing at his own jokes the whole time; we can do that for him. A real talent.
