Susan Murray: Photo Booth

A photo booth is an odd item to get fixated on, and it would be forgivable to dismiss this show as a theme too far. Why, next year we’ll have comics doing an hour on the merits of different tax forms, or tributes to their favourite towel.

Thankfully this show isn’t really about booths themselves—although we do find out the curious way in which they’re serviced—but the photos that emerge and the foibles of the folks captured on them. If there’s one thing the general public are always keen to see, it’s other people’s passport photos, and Murray has lined up a real rogue’s gallery.

Many of the villainous-looking suspects are actually perfectly civil friends and relatives, and lining up those mugshots gives this perky, punchy comic the ideal platform to get the intimate Stand IV audience involved. Asking them to guess a stranger’s name isn’t hugely enriching, admittedly, and we do wander down a few uninspiring comic routes along the way. But the climactic guessing game is a corker: which of the old college gang turned out to be genuinely sinister? The subsequent tale is compulsive listening, with a freakish visual twist.

Murray is a genial host—although the bit where she revels in someone’s death from cancer is slightly jarring—and while some decent punchlines fall flat in this sedate late-afternoon setting, she moves things along swiftly, to a poignant but fitting finale.

An accomplished storyteller, in her capable hands that show about the towel might just be worth watching.