4/5 stars

The Original Oak’s upstairs room is a small and unfussy affair, with seating made up of a mixture of armchairs and stools and many patrons huddled against the bar at the back of the room. This comfy, old-fashioned pub setting was well-suited to Alun Cochrane’s unique brand of comedy, blending a ‘no-nonsense’ Northern attitude with trips to the irreverent, the non-sequitur and occasionally the downright bizarre. While Alun’s appeal is broad and his observational style seems at first a little familiar, there’s certainly more to his comedy than initially meets the eye.

Possessing a monotone, sad-sack style a million miles away from happy-go-lucky, Alun focuses in on life’s small moments of the strange, surreal or the enraging which seem to go unnoticed by everyone else. Displaying the kind of misanthropy which Jack Dee would find a bit heavy, Cochrane makes hilarious, true-to-life observations with the kind of grumpy outlook which could only credibly come from a man born in Glasgow and raised in West Yorkshire. Despite this world-weary cynicism, Alun’s style is affable, conversational and even a little bit rambling. The show lacks a real narrative structure (outside of Alun’s oft-repeated desire to pay off his mortgage), but this is made up for with a through-the-roof gag rate and the huge range of topics mined, from irritating mates to ill-advised ski holidays to a corned beef hash containing none of the actual ingredients for corned beef hash.

His casual style helped him out greatly in dealing with a particularly troublesome, heavily drunken heckler at the Oak, who started acting out during the support act and continued to disrupt the early part of Cochrane’s show. However, Cochrane clearly had the finesse to turn the heckler into golden material, resulting in a (in his own words) “psycho-twatic experience” which had to be seen to be believed.

Sean Hayes