Jimmy McGhie: Artificial Intelligence

A white, middle-class, tediously handsome young male moping about his internship at the BBC? When you stop chuckling at that recipe for hysteria you’ll understand why standup Jimmy McGhie has been allocated one of Pleasance Dome’s smaller rooms.

His guileless Artificial Intelligence rather flounders with concessions to the audience, self-deprecation and a tendency to rake the obvious middle-ground of observational gags. Still, amid the safety lurks more depth, quirk and cerebral acumen than McGhie readily reveals.

Most compelling is his insight into his mildly sociopathic method of weathering dull conversations. “I’ve got a five-point system of tactical nods,” he boasts, including an ingeniously coined black belt of nods, “The eureka suppression nod”, which he demonstrates like a deadly funny Dragon’s Den pitch. 

Further confessions reveal that ex-drama student McGhie needs a whole foreign persona just to get through foreplay (charming English gaucheness, check). The same applies to his standup; Artificial Intelligence’s riskiest lines are delivered veiled in McGhie’s diverse dialects. Most memorable is the co-worker whose Aussie accent mangles the name of television physicist Brian Cox. “Ten million tuned in to watch Brown Cocks!” McGhie lilts gleefully.

He may have “nodded the shit out of” much of the Beeb, but in this third solo Fringe show McGhie still seems to regress back to his days warming up the Loose Women studio audience. Here, with a more cultivated crowd, a little more of his idiosyncracies wouldn't go amiss.