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Ninia Benjamin – Sunday 2 September 2007 - by David Lovesy
The Clock Inn for Comedy is probably the longest running comedy club in Milton Keynes.  Others have sprung up and wobbled down again, but the Clock Inn has run it’s seasons pretty regularly for the last fifteen years. In honesty, I hadn’t been to more than one of their nights in the last eight years so I was looking forward to seeing how the format ran!
The Clock Inn is a fairly intimate venue. I’ve always liked it as a comedy venue – the space feels right, in a way I haven’t seen replicated at other stand-up gigs in Milton Keynes. £6.50 gets you in and the bar prices are pretty good – plus they sell Marmite crisps so they were already in my good books.
The compere, Andrew Bird, hails from Northampton and I’ve seen him at least once before. He has an easy manner with the audience and did a fair job of warming us up – a bit too much targetting of the audience for my taste (guess who the victim was!) but I can forgive – if you’ve got six fortnightly gigs in the same venue with mostly the same audience it isn’t an easy job to write new material all the time!
First up on the bill was not the advertised act! Liam Mullone was on a sickbed near Edinburgh, so in his stead Debra-Jane Appelby came to perform (interestingly, Debra-Jane is down to do her own slot on 28th October so they’re either swapping round or she’s got six weeks to come up with a new half-an-hour!). She gave a good twenty-five minutes, and I liked her material – not much outside the usual “I’m fat, and ugly – let’s talk about the sex I don’t get” but enough to stand her apart from many of the other female comics I’ve seen.
The headliner for the evening was Ninia Benjamin – I’d heard her several times before in various comedy programmes on the radio, so my expectations were high!
I didn’t like her. Sorry. When I used to watch a lot of stand-up comedy you used to be able to play “stand-up bingo” with quite a lot of female comics – mostly the same topics were covered, and maybe I just can’t empathise but I didn’t really hear anything new. In fact, if she had covered menstruation I could have completed the checklist and won a toaster. She is a confident and watchable performer, though – and the two girls sat nearest to me were laughing hard throughout.
I would like to see more people giving the Clock Inn a go – it suffered a little in recent years with too small an audience to make everyone feel comfortable, but a few new faces in the crowd would make all the difference. There are some excellent performers coming up – Dan Evans, Chris Neill, Junior Simpson, Isy Suttie – and you get the feeling that Clock Inn for Comedy is something that people know goes on but don’t make the trip out to see. Change your habits, people! Go along to the next one on Sunday 16 September – visit www.shenleyleisure.org.uk for more information.
Reading this back it feels like I have just gone on a chauvanistic rant about female comics – I could try and redress the balance, but I won’t! Email with your strongly worded objections! |
