(published 14th August 2002)

What does Charlie Chuck care? As one of the most esoteric performers on the comedy circuit, Chuck thrives on the obscure and the out-of-place. And his Scrooge is a masterpiece of oddity.
He eats Sugar Puffs and Volvic out of a dog bowl, pulls the wings off butterflies and is seemingly in the latter stages of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

This was such a strange Scrooge that, for a good 50 per cent of the show, I was left wondering whether it was the character, or Chuck himself, who was engaged in a very public nervous breakdown. In fact, Scrooge only hangs around for the first half of the performance, before leaving us with pure, unadulterated Chuck - yikes.

He becomes enraged over the memory of his ex-wife’s Ouija-board use and throws a table across the room, narrowly missing a startled American in the front row, ruminates on the importance of wiping your arse with a beaver and tells us about the time he was locked in a cupboard and visited by a one-eyed dog, with a white beard.

In the past, people used to pay to visit the mad in Bedlam. Now you can do the same at the Fringe. Just make sure you get there before the ambulance arrives.