Comedians often strenuously cultivate a 'thing'. A spiel. A backstory. More cynically, a selling point. They’re posh. They’re Jamaican. They’re a woman. Often this defining characteristic is so over-egged that the comic confines themselves to caricature, a stale reinforcement of stereotype. Not so with Oliver Taylor, Footlight and star of Lively Orator.

Taylor, who ‘sells’ himself as a comic-book-cum-Medicine-reading dweeb, isn’t, it quickly transpires, selling anything. He just is. His comedy is therefore consistent, although not always conscious: the audience were as amused by his verbal ticks and Freudian slips ("A MADical student? What the fuck!") as by his "here’s one I made earliers". Strangely, jokes that strayed too far into the plain lands of psycho-nerdism make better material more credible: this nerd is for real.

Taylor does an impressive job of populating an empty stage, pulling off even the most gimmicky tricks with aplomb. A particular crowd-pleaser is his ramshackle bookshelf, the source of poetic interludes that provide welcome variety to this one-man extravaganza. Though (unsurprisingly for 11pm on the Monday of May Week) the audience is sparse, Taylor makes a virtue of this paucity, cultivating a boisterous familiarity that even allows him to tell his audience to "Fuck off".

The only caveat to this was that the profusion of Taylor’s family and friends proved all too tempting, leaving the rest of us feeling privy to an extended private joke. References to his girlfriend, at first endearing, became excessive. Ditto friends. However, one particular running joke, featuring Taylor’s friend and tecchie ‘Toby’, was a notable exception, and made clever use of technology.

The cohesion this and other devices attempt to provide, however, was hit-and-miss. Though the need for some overarching theme in a show that might otherwise be a string of dissociated anecdotes is pressing, crowbarring one can be awkward.

This said, Taylor’s not trying to be any sort of smooth operator. In fact, he’s actively aiming at the awkward. And in this, he succeeds unequivocally.