"I heard through the grapevin that fruit stems don't carry sound waves."

Vic McGlynn Top quality night at the Malarkey on Tuesday with some excellent comics on. First up, trying out some new material was Vic McGlynn.

Vic's new stuff included the confession about cutting her own hair and making a proper arse of it (see picture). Mind you, it enabled her to come up with some gags about having a square head. She also has some funny ideas about what blokes get up to with her material on women's penis envy - I've never heard of the schlong lasso!

Most of the set went well enough, a couple of gags were met with murmers, and the odd one fell flat, but these can be ironed out with a bit of practice. Good presentation though. And it was all new stuff.

Dominic Woodward Next on was someone who regularly tries new material out at Malarkey's, Dom Woodward.

Dom's set was a mix of new material and old. There was some new stuff about the book shop he works in which went down quite well, and the bit about gang names was particularly good, but the use of the word 'scholastic' was superb.

Some good new material tonight - nice to see Dom writing more and more stuff.

Richard Swan Deadpan oddball Richard Swan was up next.

I've seen Richard several times at The Comedy Balloon and for some reason the odd delivery (especially the "Err!") gets funnier and funnier. I think it's because I like the deadpan one-liners which are in a vaguely similar style to Anthony J Brown.

Some of the gags were lost on a few people and I'm in two minds as to whether the bizarre delivery works. It does for me, but that's my personal taste. Still, he got a healthy round of applause at the end, so not bad at all.

Dave Spikey After the break came an unadvertised, surprise appearance from none other than Dave Spikey, better known as Jerry 'The Saint' St Clair from Phoenix Nights.

Dave was trying out some stuff for his national tour and chose XS Malarkey to do it at (the man has good taste), and consisted of 35 minutes of anecdotes and gags which had the audience in stitches.

Dave is very much in the Peter Kay mould, northern humour with a high gag content, in a slightly more 'traditional' stand-up fashion, rather than some of the more surreal alternative comics on the scene. More punchlines that you can shake a stick at, and pretty much all of them hit the mark (one or two you could see coming, though).

A fantastic set all told, and a nice surprise for the audience. It was kept secret due to the last time Dave was on and we advertised, it was mayhem. Plus we'd rather give something to the people who turn up regularly rather than people who only want to see someone famous.

Noel Kelly Cockernee comic Noel Kelly headlined the night.

Noel put in a pretty solid performance generally, with generally more highs than lows, some of the accents and impressions being the highlight for me, posh people having fights in pubs, for example: "Hello, sorry to interrupt, but I couldn't help noticing that your pint is - er - a puff." The James Bond stuff was also pretty good.

The only real minus point was that he wasn't open for long enough (just shy of 20 minutes), although that wasn't really his fault as Dave was playing an extended support slot, so it was more like a double headliner night I suppose.

Another good the Malarkey. See you next week.

Spider.