Gordon Ramsey Sex Dwarf eaten by badgers. Got your attention? Sure, but the boy couldn’t run with it. This sadly reflected the pattern of the show - you can have the best ingredients in the world, but if you’re a poor cook you’re not going to pull out a great cake. Paddy McGee’s show Do Not Trust the Animals consists of a haphazard mix of good, healthy comic ideas that McGee fails to do justice to.
With half the audience sitting with a restricted view - some even with their backs to McGee - and most having taken the flyer as a free ticket out of the dreary weather, McGee admittedly doesn’t have much to work with. In fact, not long after his warm up act Dom Lister worked the room well for about thirty seconds, McGee warned us that jokes in his act would be few and far between. Throw in some props: a drawing board, a permanent marker, a tattered copy of Aesop’s Fables, and a book on how to draw animals and he still couldn’t pull out very much. The young lad could feel his gig failing, even with the laughter that seemed more helpful than genuine, and started interrupting his rehearsed set - which was mainly reading some obscure fables and giving them a weak commentary, occasionally mentioning his controlling father and Australian upbringing - with possibly untested material that fell flat in the first five seconds.
He’s got some good ideas, both building a fable from audience suggestion and ridiculing Aesop but his performance needed a bit more imagination and finesse to let his ideas reach their true potential.