Jessica Ransom: Unsung Heroes

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A huge improvement on last year’s so-so Ransom’s Million, this tight character comedy showcase from erstwhile Armstrong and Miller sidekick Jessica Ransom entertains from first to last, with scarcely a misstep throughout.

Capably incorporating slide projection and audience interaction, her hour veritably romps along as she focuses on society’s uncelebrated few, offering a broad spectrum of the overlooked, downtrodden outsiders looking wistfully in. After a succession of snapshot creations, their essence distilled into pithy one-liners, we meet Anne, who is self-effacing to the point of being invisible. “Organiser” for the show, she’s also the originator of its refrain that something cannot be done because “we’re not insured for it”, an imposition that Ransom has occasional fun challenging.

An obedient maid at a stately home emerges as the model of unwitting testimony, her efforts to disguise her aristocratic employers’ indiscretions amusingly revealing, while Andy Serkis’ Motion Capture School manages to balance subtle (and not-so-subtle) digs at showbusiness with knockabout crowd involvement. Ransom’s most memorable creation is the wife of a celebrity chef, a marginalised, humiliated creature in whom Gordon Ramsay’s lawyers may wish to take an interest. Her insecurity most clearly manifests itself in mashing her breasts together, starkly contrasting with the comic’s deluded businesswoman/receptionist, whose bosom becomes a weapon in her upwardly mobile efforts at sexual blackmail.

A final offering involving a pumped-up US bounty-hunter-turned-personal trainer seems somewhat limited, but there’s some nice lines in her backstory and the show finishes with a feelgood burst of crowd participation.