Paul the Sausage King...

Not the greatest of nights tonight; solid if unspectacular. Guest compere for the evening while Toby was away on holiday was roly-poly funnyman John Warburton.

John opened with with energy and enthusiasm and immediately chatted to a few members of the audience. He managed to squeeze a couple of bits of material in (games teachers at school and fat kids). It seemed to get the show off to a reasonable start.

First act on tonight was a Malarkey regular, Mike Landers.

Mike opened up with some of his tried and tested gags, which were met with an okay response, then followed it up with some new material, including his girlfriend's thigh-based tattoo, pop tart Pink being compared to a ten-to-two pull, The Passion of The Christ and porcine waste of air Jade Goody. They went reasonably well and he made a shrewd move by putting in the 'Priceless' gag in the middle, which always gets a good response. The audience took a while to warm up but it wasn't a bad gig by any stretch. If there's one thing to say about Mike it's that he's a fairly prolific writer.

Second act of the night, and making his XS Malarkey debut, was Scottish comic David Blair.

I'd seen David a few times at the Beat The Frog night at the Frog & Bucket, and if truth be told, he hadn't done that well there, so I was wondering how he'd fair at Malarkey's. I was pleasantly surprised though as he had the best gig I've seen him do and went down reasonably well with the crowd (who were unusually quiet tonight). It wasn't raucous by any means but they paid attention and laughed in the right places. The only unfortunate part of the set was when David forgot his material. Ah well. I'll put that down to nerves.

Third act on in the first section was musical double act Bullett and Gunn.

The theme of the act was a workshop in how to write a comedy song (not the most original idea, it was done a few weeks previously by Isy Suttie who did a brilliant job of it; Daniel Kitson has also done joke deconstruction in his set). They started off with a simple Change The Words Of The Pop Song bit in which they changed the words to one of Avril Lavigne's songs (to now be about ladyboys), followed by a bit about leading the audience to believe there's a rude word coming, then substituting it at the last minute - for an even ruder one. The highlight of the set followed, achieving the growl that Enrique Inglesias does at the start of every line by burping. Basic, but funny. The set ended with a song with eight key changes, and they went off to a decent round of applause. A pretty good set from the pair, but I thought they were better the first time they played Malarkey's.

Main support of the evening came in the form of showbiz legend Peter Pitzburg.

Peter's set was pretty much the same as on previous occasions, but with a guest appearance by his mate Jimmy Letterhead on guitar. There were some new songs (spoof versions of Golden Brown and Under The Bridge) but the concept was pretty much the same (Bullet and Gunn-style changing the words of the pop song). I'd say it was a pretty good performance from Peter; Lee wasn't as impressed. Perhaps in comparison to the rest of the fairly flat night it seemed better. There was plenty of wacky dancing dancing and combing of hair on stage which got me laughing anyway. However, he went on for far too long for a main support act (half an hour).

The headliner tonight was Didsbury-based posh lad Dave Williams.

Dave introduced himself and bantered with the audience for a while and went into some tried and tested material, some new material (some of which worked, some got ripples of laughter). Much of the set deals with posh people and living in Didsbury. There are some cracking lines in there but I think it would be better with slightly more diverse material. That said, Dave gave a pretty good performance - not the best I've ever seen him by some way but enough to get a decent amount of laughs from the crowd.

Spider.