India & Patrick Learn To Host a Show is designed and built to be fast-moving, lightweight entertainment. There’s topical parody in the mix, stand-up and music, banter with the audience. India Worsnop and Patrick Cunneen, the host / performers, can sing, play an instrument or two, switch mood, deliver a line or a story.

You can imagine Worsnop and Cunneen working happily with a room full of punters doing shots and out for a good time. Between them, they’ve got the charm, skills and moxie needed to do the job. They’ve also got a nice flexible vehicle – here we are, learning to host a comedy show, come along for the ride while we try out our stuff.

The show’s material is a loosely connected patchwork. They start with material they decided not to put in, but here it is anyway. India does modern suburban woman on Facebook (a touch of social satire here). There’s a fanfiction skit. Patrick gets married. And there’s more, as India and Patrick segue from topic to topic, style to style, varying the pace with some craft and forethought. It’s upbeat, good-humoured and carries the thin audience along once the performers warm up. There’s barely a mention of COVID, which seems a trifle odd for a comedy show based on observational humour.

The show runs a bit under time on the night your reviewer attends, probably because there aren’t enough people in the room – you need an audience to make audience participation work. The performers do a professional job of keeping the mood of the show going, but I’m guessing they’ve got a lot more material they would have pulled out for a bigger, more rambunctious crowd. 

It isn’t clear from the program who gets credit for sound and lighting (possibly Tom Tobin and Tessa Erskine), but it all works a treat.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer