But I am a smooth man

I couldn't get to sleep last night so I listened to the first half of Beyond the Fringe. So many times have I heard it that I thought I would probably nod off to Alan Bennett's dulcet tones and predictable punchlines within minutes.

Unfortunately I was kept awake by the first tiny and niggling and then increasingly nagging realisation that most of it just isn't very good.

Everyone remembers Peter Cook's man on a bench, Alan Bennett's sermon or the groundbreaking Harold MacMillan impression - but these are but a few great parts of a long, long sketch show where decent material is actually alarmingly thin on the ground. Some of the sketches are drawn out, tedious and fail to deliver an interesting punchline when they need to. Some of them do nothing at all to justify their existence - why oh why the Royal Box sketch? Why didn't anybody edit the philosophy sketch?

Alan Bennett spends several minutes delivering a monolgue which actually has no laughs in it at all. It is actually embarrassing to listen to.

I've thought about this, and I really don't think that the show has just "dated" or become less relevant - it's simply that much of the material isn't very well written.

The only material, in fact, which is polished to the point of being genuinely impressive, are Dudley Moore's musical skits. But people don't talk in hushed, reverent tones about Dudley Moore's contribution to the development of comedy in the 1960s, because let's face it, a satirical piece on Beethoven, brilliant or not, is hardly topical.

Three stars.