The Wireless Sketch Show

We’re crammed, twenty of us, into a small room above a student pub in Liverpool. Outside it’s raining hard; inside the atmosphere isn’t so much expectant as damp. It may be writer and collective member Chris Fittock’s hometown, with his family turning out to support him, but this is still going to be a cold audience, in both senses. Then we hear that there’s been a car crash as the company tried to navigate Liverpool’s current, fiendish roadworks. Mercifully no-one’s hurt but they’re all late and a bit shaken. I sit there with rainwater dripping off me, and my sock squelching whenever I shift position wondering if it would have been kinder to stay at home tonight for both of us.

Dog-Eared aren’t so easily defeated however, and if they’re thrown by their day they hide it well. Wireless is a sketch show, with various bizarre excursions into human oddity woven around an increasingly bonkers Victorian melodrama, and Dog-Eared bring energy and a keen sense of observation to both.

The five performers in Dog-Eared are uniformly capable, showing a great energy and sense of fun, so it’s unfair to single anyone out. There’s a broad range of targets in Dog-Eared’s humour, and inevitably I didn’t find everything funny. However my companion loved the sketches that left me cold, so it’s probably fair to say there’s something here for everyone. Definitely worth a look.

"The Wireless Sketch Show" is on tour. See www.dogearedcollective.co.uk for dates.