It’s a cliché of student reviewing to discuss its own purpose: but this one is going to do it anyway. That’s because Smokers are (even if Varsity always makes it look easy) really hard to assess, and attention should be drawn to that. There is no uniform idea, no coherence to the performance and – quite obviously – some sections of them are always better than others. So it’s hard to know whether to review the night, or to review the acts. And, unfortunately, in this case there was a disparity between the two.

The Footlights is, amongst other stock phrases, a hot bed of talent, a nursery for comedic stars. Ahir Shah shone, as always, playing a schizophrenic murderer representing himself in court and Charlotte Jeffrey’s sarcastic riff on a board game about ‘Stranger Danger’ received uproarious laughter. Lucy Farrett’s series of three (slightly creepy) Valentine’s Day date dissections deserves a special mention and Harry Michell’s mis-synching actions and speech was also brilliant. He was witty, intelligent and just really damn impressive. His timing was perfect, and his sketch was able to stand out even from the dazzling collection on show.

Not all sketches were of such a high quality: a large part of the appeal of Footlight’s comedy is that it is new and unoriginality in a Smoker is a fault hard to forgive. Charlie Palmer’s re-hash of the Oxbridge rejection story from about 4 weeks ago suffered from this fatal flaw. Oxbridge is an issue close to most of our hearts, and the story has not been an obscure one. We have heard most of the jokes before.  Sadly Lowell Belfield was also not at his original best, and his self-help style parody was more than slightly familiar. It was a good sketch, and funny, but even funnier when Alex Owen did much the same thing in previous years.

It can be agreed that the Footlights, individually, shone. But the night, the performance, the smoker was less good. There were no technical glitches, everything ran smoothly, but an ADC late show is almost always better when it is shorter. The closer an audience gets to midnight, and even the further they go past it, the more they regret coming. Sadly, at around ninty minutes in length, this Smoker went on long enough for people (or at least those who were not engaging in Valentine’s neck nibbling in the stalls) to want to go home.  Of course, a Smoker is a chance for comics to show off their talents, and, with a guaranteed sell out audience, everyone wants to be in it. But that doesn’t mean the organisers should let them be. There were hilarious sketches, and some brilliant stand-out performances: but the line up could have been slightly pruned to make the night even better.