Dave Baucett is a puppyish like-me-pleeease comedian in his early twenties. His title tells no lies, in that all his material comes out of his personal life: his mum, his grannie, his job at John Lewis, coming from Stevenage. There are passing references to the Olympics, as from every single bloody comedian in Edinburgh. Baucett does a lot of appeals to shared experience: ‘Did you ever…?’ which sees hands shoot up over the room.
The lounge-size room seats 20 people, so it’s a piece of cake to get a full house. Baucett was almost full on this occasion; 15 of the audience were under 25 and two were in their sixties. The front row contained three teenage girls who giggled at everything Baucett said and to whom he played much of his material to the exclusion of the rest of the audience. He still went down pretty well with the younger members who got all his references.
He doesn’t really do jokes. The set doesn’t have any shape to it, and it doesn’t build to a climax, it merely stops. He appeals for sympathy on the grounds that he is ‘still learning’ and since it’s a free show you can’t really complain. Still, I hope he goes away with a sense that it requires a lot more work to create a good stand-up set. In an atmosphere as competitive as Edinburgh, this won’t wash.
At the start Jamie Oliphant was the warm-up act with better material. Equally appealing to Da Yoof, he peppered his set with ‘Well, Man’ and the like, but his riff on going to The Hive, a local club which is a ‘melting pot of hormones and Bacardi Breezers’, was inventive and struck a chord in a way that Baucett failed to do.
