The Footlights Smokers are one of the more peculiar reviews to read each term, in that you can often guess most of the content without even bothering to read it. Not all comedy is for everyone so they rarely see 5 stars, but as sold-out touring shows and an unrivalled range of alumni shows, these are still some of the brightest young comedians in the country. Whatever your taste, there’s going to be something for you.

For me, a standout favourite had to be Matty Bradley and his mastery of facial expressions – his ability to make the audience laugh without saying a word saved more than one sketch on the brink of mediocrity. A particular highlight was an inspired sketch with Bradley and Jon Bailey on the unlikely origins of the caesarean section with (this wasn’t as grotesque as it sounds) great use of props for physical comedy. Bailey, too, was a strong comedian with a helpful dose of perspective: “If God was going to do comedy, this isn’t what he’d do.”

It certainly wasn’t a faultless evening: one sketch resorted to the performer reciting his material topless in a vague eastern-European accent in an attempt to make it funny, which I felt was beneath him given his stand-up routine a few minutes previously which had me bursting out laughing with one liners worthy of Tim Vine.

One of the defining qualities of Footlights Smokers is that the sketches that don’t work are also the ones that don’t outstay their welcome. These were often half-formed ideas with which the performer wanted to test the water, and the blackout comes before you have time to judge it too harshly. In comparison, the longer sketches are the ones that really make you laugh, one in particular involving a dim-witted but highly conversational French alligator who tells it like it is.

This review would be incomplete without mentioning Zoë Tomalin and Siân Docksey’s sketch on the differences between the potential reviews of the evening in Varsity and The Tab. It was positively dripping in stereotypes about pretentious Varsity and low-brow Tab journalism, which I found quite flattering, though I doubt my Tab counterpart felt the same. In an evening where the bulk of the sketches were more average than outstanding, they predicted both papers would call the sketch show a “hit and miss” performance. Let’s just say, it had its ups and downs.