Tom Deacon: Deaconator

Pleasance Dome

Until August 26

★★

TOM DEACON seems like a very nice young man. The kind of guy a twenty-something young woman could safely take home to meet her parents – if only he'd stop making dirty jokes about biscuits.

This Radio 1 DJ has recently hit the age of 26, which has plunged him into an existential crisis exacerbated by his girlfriend calling him a "boy man".

Rather than challenge this accusation, he compounds it, with a stand-up set which is largely about his quest to exorcise the ghosts he acquired when he failed to complete the 1995 English football sticker album, by filling the album for the 2010 World Cup. Add to that his crippling Xbox addiction, and the impression of a shambolic, perpetual undergraduate male is complete.

Deacon has a certain stage charm and the abundant insignificance of his subject matter is, without a doubt, its very point. However, one can't help feel that his at best mildly amusing, laddish ramblings are evidence of a tiredness in confessional comedy.

Mark Brown