Place on bill: 1^st Act

Venue: Creased Up - The Hawth,Crawley

Date of show: 12^th May 2005

No offence intended but Josie Long looked like she was an inpatient on day release. With an appearance that belied her apparent age, a permanent manic wide-eyed smile, nervous-like hand movements and a ceaseless delivery with much role-playing involved she reminded me of my four-year-old discussing her bestest ever day ever. EVER.

            And then there’s her material. How to describe that?

            By staying with the current analogy and imagining listening to a child relate a conversation she had heard somebody else saying. There are some elements of reality that filter through the story that allow you some grasp of what’s going on but then there is usually a thousand other influences that disrupt the narrative to give it a surreal, sometimes intangible but always, amusing quality.

            Josie Long goes ‘off on one’, quite immersed in her own World, and tries so very hard to get us to join her but ultimately only achieves allowing a peak through a crack in the doorway.

            But it doesn’t matter that some of her jokes don’t go anywhere, or the punchlines sometimes don’t match the build-up or even that she doesn’t seem to make any sense at all because she looks like she’s having such a great time that she makes them all work in her own zany way.

            Being first on the bill can’t be easy at the best of times and certainly more so when you are an ‘odd’ act and need the audience to be less switched on to get into the set.

            Definitely someone to look out for even if only out of morbid fascination.