Alex Zane

Before he became a Channel 4 presenter and Xfm DJ, Alex Zane was a standup comic, and finalist of So You Think You're Funny, aged only 18, in 1998. This return to his roots suggests he hasn't watched much comedy since. However uncontrollably the teenage girls in his audience giggle, Zane offers only a pedestrian hour of observational boilerplate. Its strenuous efforts to get us all on board ("round of applause if you were a packed-lunch kid at school!") fail to conceal Zane's lack of anything interesting to say.

One's first impression is of insincerity. An opening routine about being uncool is a bit rich from a man best known for MTV shows and hobnobbing with Alexa Chung. His medical-school material likewise feels phoney: did he really answer "laughter" to the exam question "what's the best treatment for prostate cancer?" But Zane's greater crime is banality. Apparently, it's embarrassing to be asked to talk dirty during sex – who knew? – while looking at other men's penises at a urinal is a no-no. This hat is so old it's made out of woolly mammoth pelt.

He is at least a competent performer, and his show resembles effective standup. There are one or two amusing observations – why, say, is women's fancy dress always sexy and men's, juvenile? But more often, the jokes feel untrue, or unimportant, or recycled. A skit about Terry Nutkins shagging a seal might have been randomly generated by some chugging comedy engine; another about taglines to movies flounders on the innocuous examples Zane cites. His relationship philosophies ("people ask people to do things the other person doesn't want to do") are as humdrum as they are clumsily expressed. Standup may be Zane's first love, but old flames can be hard to reignite.