Mark Lester's Attention Span Camden Fringe 2011 review

It's never a good sign when your audience attention wanders, especially when your show is only an hour long. Mark Lester is a man with a keyboard and I'd been expecting an hour full of bawdy songs and smart humour. Instead I found a singer who was so keen to get a rhyme that he matched 'cinema' with 'dinema' and peppered his act with in jokes directed to his friends in the front row.

This softly spoken singer had a rather nervous style and his act could have used a lot of editing as many of the songs went on for ten or twenty seconds or so to long, and his attempts at harmonizing with himself felt flat. It was classic cruise ship cabaret fare that never stirred us with ist cleverness or tried to push any boundaries. An example would be the 'God hates beetroot song', which Lester described as 'ironic', but the irony was all on him.

His act also has strange interludes where he got a singer on stage – the striking Liza Keast- to perform, yet her act was completely unrelated to his. He had a string of songs whose jokes felt flat, and she sang love songs with a wavering voice and a spark in her eyes. Sure, Lester created her songs, but it did feel like we were watching a show that voided the trade descriptions act. Her final song- Eleanor Rigby inspired- had potential, but at this point we'd given up.

Mark Lester had a few gems up his sleeve- a small song about Oliver Twist and his osteopathy career and one where he played a saucy room owner and made innuendoes about suitcase sizes, but even these pieces could have been more polished. I liked the phrases in his 'I'm doing the credit crunch' song, but a different tempo and more of a stage presence was needed to pull it off successfully.

The ticket came with a  free glass of wine, but with this show it should have come with seven.