Phill Jupitus Quartet: Made Up

Improv shows are by their nature obviously liable to vary wildly in quality from one performance to the next, but this one has the personnel and a formula simple enough to deliver the goods every time.

Hirsute comedic polymath and man of many a TV panel show Phill Jupitus is our host for an hour of, as he puts it, “men of an age who should know better fucking around for your pleasure”. Andy Smart, Steve Steen and Niall Ashdown are the garish shirt-sporting gents filling the other three spaces in his quartet (though expect Steve Frost or Ian Coppinger to be subbed into the team on occasion). Together they present a series of Whose Line Is It Anyway-style short-form improvisational games based on elements shouted out at random by the audience.

A quick-fire storytelling round about Albert Einstein and a cheese grater is an inauspicious start, but things pick up with a tag-team stream of gags based on shifting mime positions, which sees the foursome amusingly get from dog to doggy-style via the Macarena, meerkats and rolling a giant joint.

Steen and Smart steal the show with a two-hander that sees the former play a Slovenian doctor giving a talk in gibberish Slovene and the latter his translator – a routine culminating in Steen gamely performing a TV ad for pickled turnips that involves skiing, a song and an elaborate choreographed dance.

Any improv show that ends with the performers themselves wiping tears of laughter from their eyes has to go down as a success.