Steve Coogan

Not so much "Ah ha ha" as "Arrgh!", Steve Coogan's one-man show Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters could and should be so much better.

Coogan and his contemporaries – comic writers such as Armando Iannucci and Rob Brydon – have been behind some of the most innovative and avant-garde comedy to have come out of the UK over the last 20 years. And there are few comedy series so hilarious and timeless as Coogan's I'm Alan Partridge et al. But brought to the Sydney Comedy Festival stage, the humour feels strangely dated and past its best.

The first half of the show features Pauline Calf, a smutty slut with fake boobs who, after scanning the audience to see how many of them she has "had", reads out an excerpt from her saucy new novel – think Barbara Cartland meets Picture magazine. The gags are rapid-fire but all follow the same predictable format of the suspended innuendo. For example, when talking about her diet, Pauline remarks that she gets "three good portions a day" before saying "as for what I eat, mind your own business." B'dum tsh!

Next comes her older brother Paul Calf – once he's finished emptying the contents of his bladder, stomach and throat into the toilet offstage. A mulleted working class spiv, he says what he likes and he likes what he bloody well says. The audience is less enamoured.

Then aging, lounge-singing lothario Tony Ferrino pours onto the stage like an oil slick. The highlight of his set is when he plucks a poor woman out of the front row to cruelly serenade on stage with a song entitled "Ordinary Girl". But it all feels a bit cruise ship.

In essence, Steve Coogan is in danger of becoming the very comedian he is lampooning – a slightly pathetic cliché, stuck in his own Groundhog Day, soullessly trotting out tried and tired material for lukewarm laughs and then returning to the loneliness of his soulless hotel before doing it all again the next day.

At one point during the show my girlfriend whispered to me that this was like an episode of Phoenix Nights, the Peter Kay sitcom set in a particularly down-at-heel workman's club (read RSL) in northern England.

One wonders why Coogan is doing this tour. It can't be because he needs the money. He's got bit-parts in more commercially successful films than you would think – Tropic Thunder and Night at the Museum 1 and 2 amongst them – as well as several lead roles in flops such as Around the World in 80 Days and Hamlet 2.

When Time Out interviewed him ahead of his arrival, he said that he was doing it because "wanted to get back that feeling I'd had 10 years before, which I knew was the best feeling in the world, hearing a large number of people laugh at your funny jokes." In which case, maybe all parties were left underwhelmed by mutually lacklustre performance.   

Coogan saves his best until last, devoting most of the second half to Alan Partridge, the fist-eatingly excruciating local radio DJ turned failed chat show host who has reinvented himself one more time to become a self-help guru, sponsored by cat food manufacturer Whiskas. It's funny, but some of the insert-Australian-reference here jokes felt like they were written by mail merge.

The disappointment isn't because the show is bad because it's not; it's actually quite good. But when you are as talented as Coogan, quite good isn't quite good enough. Dan Rookwood