After a slow start with a hastily-assembled topical sketch playing on the Pope’s resignation, it needed Ben Pope’s stand-up set to really get the night moving.  Pope seems to know how audiences tick and is at his wittiest when he plays to this strength, effortlessly sparring with the laughter or lack of it.  The other stand-up acts struggled to create a stage presence, partly due to nerves, but also because they had lower grade material.

As ever with Footlights Smokers, there were germs of ideas, some of which were gems, others good but outstayed their welcome, and some which (hopefully) will never be aired again.  Punch lines were a recurrent issue.  Some of the sketches, notably the ‘lone wolves’, seemed to lack them entirely, while many ended with lines tacked on for closure rather than humour.  A very well-conceived dress-tease sketch went down brilliantly, but the punch line was a clunky and even distasteful addition; while a promising emoticons skit unfortunately wilted.  Similarly, a Shrove Tuesday ghost story had all the verbal dexterity to fit Matt Bradley’s book at bedtime style, but took an unnecessarily twisted turn to make it more awkward than funny.

A sketch’s best chance of having a proper punch line was if it featured Alex MacKeith.  He stood out with his physical exuberance as not-Harry Potter and an unreasonable aggressive marketing executive, and was kind enough, along with Will Attenborough, to entertain us with a private corpsing contest dressed up as a sketch about palm reading.  There was no punch line to his surreal rant as Roger Federer, but here his meandering could be indulged.

John Bailey’s attempts at object humour rather than class-based conceits allowed a relative newcomer to pull off the latter very well, guitar in hand.  It is a pity I can’t praise him by name, though the lack of running orders at Smokers has also spared some of the other performers from naming and shaming.