CityLife

Beat the Frog: Rachel Rose + Paul Cronin + Craig Haddock + Mark Goddard

BEAT the Frog is a normal open mic night for fledgling comics rolled into a gong show, and this week became one of the raft of events in the Not Part Of festival.

Members of the audience are given cardboard frogs and if the various comics survive for five minutes without all three frogs being held aloft they’ve won.

It’s like Britain’s Got Talent, with the exception that it doesn’t make you feel as if mankind should never have moved beyond the point of single cell division.

The evening is presided over with an assured charm by MC Dom Nightingale.

Seeing Nightingale work his audience one realises that the key to being a good stand-up is self-confidence.

Most of the hopefuls have middle of the road material (the one attempt at satire being a clumsy comparison between the religious and the retarded) but the successful ones simply come on with brio and sell it.

The one real novelty of the evening was an act called The Ridiculous Rap Explosion who conducts a rap duologue between two characters, a pleasing fusion of Paul Calf and Eminem.

This was an enjoyable, if balmy, evening, with a typically generous Manchester audience giving all the acts a hospitable amount of good will.

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