The promotional material says Tom Sainsbury will swagger into our hearts – a more accurate description would be ‘shuffle embarrassedly.’ But that is his trademark and the secret to this show’s success. Without stunts or gimmicks, Tom Sainsbury produces a consistently entertaining evening at Te Auaha – Tapere Nui with Gone Bananas.

Sainsbury has a self-deprecating style of humour where he is always the victim or the fall guy. The audience laughs along but always gives him their sympathy.

In a tight fifty minute show, Tom takes us back to his early years in Matamata, across to Los Angeles – including a particularly cringeworthy story about his brief encounter with a Hollywood celebrity – and on a journey through the comment sections of some local council Facebook pages.

Tom starts the show with the threat of audience participation, but even those in the front rows do not need to worry as he uses interaction with the audience as a starting point for his own digressions rather than focusing on the audience members themselves. As he explains, he has been on the receiving end of that treatment rather too often himself.

Tom has a story teller’s craft, bringing the audience along with his misadventures. If there is one shortcoming in this act, it is that we might expect him to do more to colour in the side characters in his stories – those familiar with his online work will know the huge range of voices and expressions he can conjure up. He does this very effectively with the different Facebook commentators in that part of the set – especially the ones who pop up repeatedly. But maybe it is easier to be quirky and imaginative with characters when they are built on a name and some comments, rather than people he has actually met. And the realism of the act is its main charm.

This is a very personal show and you feel you know Tom better at the end of it than you did at the beginning. Given how warm-hearted his humour is, you can’t help liking him either.

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