Joanne McNally Assembly George Square ★★★★

The area Joanne McNally treads (actually stomps might be a better word, given her fantastically high-energy performance) in The Prosecco Express is not new – she’s 36 and wondering if she should settle down and have children, or would that mean settling for less – but the Irish comic makes it her own.

Clive Anderson Assembly George Square ****

Nick Helm Pleasance Dome ****

What a pleasure it is that Nick Helm has returned to the Fringe after six years away after appearing in television comedies Uncle and The Reluctant Landlord.

Josie Long The Stand ★★★★

It has been five years since Josie Long performed a full run at the Fringe, and in the meantime she has experienced a momentous event. 

Ciaran Dowd ***

How to describe a show that by Robin Ince’s own admission doesn’t have a narrative strand, and for which he has written several pages of notes that he gets through only a small section of? Well here goes: he calls the show a mash-up of the two cultures of art and science in a celebration of the human mind, and Chaos of Delight is very well named.

There has been a trend in stand-up comedy in recent years for intensely personal shows, confessional even, but it’s the comic’s life that is usually the one being examined for comedic effect. With Arthur Smith’s latest show at Soho Theatre, however, it is his dad’s life being described here, and what a life.

Frank Skinner walks onstage without introduction and a man in the audience gives him a friendly heckle by way of greeting. Skinner is straight on it, engaging him in a brief conversation; his responses are amiable enough but have a few barbs too.

Most people know Emily Atack from The Inbetweeners, where she played Charlotte, the object of Will's desire. More recently, she found new fans as the runner-up on 2018's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! Now she is performing in her first solo comedy show, Talk Thirty to Me.

Al Murray's Pub Landlord character has been around since the mid-1990s. As such, it's a wonder that Murray has managed to reinvent the embittered, xenophobic loudmouth so many times, but he has – and the EU referendum in 2016 should have, you may have thought, given the character new life or killed him off altogether.