Terry Alderton is a comedian with many strings to his bow. He is a veritable Proteus of accents, sounds and impressions, his most notable a schizophrenic Gollum-esque inner voice that talks to him when he turns his back to the audience. It is an original, often very handy ironic device that allows him to critique individual audience members and even his own performance ('they don't know who Stewart Lee is'). But he resorts to it time and time again, and it inevitably loses some of its freshness after its fifteenth deployment. The same can be said of his Fathers 4 Justice, Superman T shirt-wearing Mr Hyde, who seems to rear his head during quieter spells. Again, very funny at first, but overused. He also beat-boxes.It would be unfair to describe Alderton as gimmicky because he exudes palpable charisma, responds well to the audience (particularly those who leave prematurely) and has some lovely material (the wonderful, almost Chaplin-esque musico-physical entrance; a virtuoso run-through of the powers of 2; 'Bagpipe Hero'), but some of the material is such standard Jongleurs fare it highlights the hollowness of the bells-and-whistles veneer. Swearing Australians, primary school teachers as nonces, wondering whether you 'would or wouldn't' of one's female relatives... enough! Terry is one of the most naturally gifted comics at the Fringe and these reductive Nuts-reader elements get huge laughs, but they must tear at the soul of a comic whose delightfully subtle Stewart Lee impression gets nothing. An effervescent, uneven, manic depressive of a show that is a staggeringly good at points and criminally mediocre at others.
