Edinburgh is starting to get back to normal following on from the Festive season, the three weeks of snow and ice is becoming less intrusive and best of all The Stand is staging top quality gigs to help banish the winter blues.

Tuesday 12 January saw us make our first 2010 visit as part of the sell-out Stewart Francis audience and it felt good to be back ‘home’ again.

An unexpected bonus on the bill was Stand favourite Susan Calman and for once she was not the compere, rather as the opening act. Okay in truth she fitted both profiles but had the best part of half an hour to build her set rather than the ten minutes here, five there etc that seems to be her lot whenever I see her.

Susan, being the great pro that she is, soon collected the room and had them with her as the genial Glaswegian former lawyer delivered her set with panache. She certainly gained a number of extra fans if my interval conversations with some of the ‘first-timers’ was any indication.

Following the interval the stage was set for Stewart Francis to take control, and he certainly did that. This self described 6ft plus gorgeous Canadian has really raised his profile over the last twelve months with numerous appearances on the box, Mock the Week more than once, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Road Show and Eight out of Ten Cats have all been graced with his presence.

Francis is certainly no story telling comedian. No he is a definite ‘one-liner’ sort of guy, often self deprecating, and nearly always dead pan. At times his style reminds me of the American great Steven Wright. He has irony off to a fine art too, It has been a long time since I have heard as many laughs in the hour than were in evidence last night, I only wished I had tried to count the number of gags he crammed into his performance, it must have been way in the excess of 200 and needless to say the whole place was in stitches.

There is no way I could do justice to any of the gags, you just have to see him for yourselves… you just must.

Francis is surely set for stardom in the very near future given his obvious talent and stage presence and works even better live than on TV, no matter how good he comes across on that medium. To that end he is talking about a DVD in the autumn, but don’t wait for that, check him out if he is doing a gig near you, and if he’s not then travel!!

For future dates at The Stand both in Edinburgh and Glasgow check out their website www.thestand.co.uk for the programme and we’ll hopefully see you there.