I recently watched "Fern Brady live at the BBC".
She is by no means the worst stand-up comedian I've ever seen on TV and I certainly wouldn't advise her to keep the day job - as her stand-up career seems to be going reasonably well.
Having said that, watching her perform was a slightly uncomfortable experience as she seemed totally disconnected from the audience. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think she'd been filmed performing to an empty room, reading from an autocue, and that the audience had somehow been Photoshopped in at a later date, along with a little canned laughter.
She's an attractive young woman which is always a plus in a predominantly visual medium, like television. She also talks at length about her sex life and about her previous career as a lap dancer: two topics which can hardly fail to get an audience's attention, particularly when the raconteur is an attractive young woman. In fairness to Fern, however, I have to say that she never once descended into crudity.
On paper, much of her material was funny but far too much of it was in serious need of a rewrite in order to make it something like funny.
The problem, however, was not the quality of her material: it was the complete disconnect between her and her audience. She appeared, for all the world, to be reciting her act in the way an actor, when alone, might recite lines from a forthcoming production just to convince himself that he has learned them properly. She certainly wasn't interacting with her audience. She wasn't even talking 'at' the audience. She was simply spouting her lines into space as if the audience did not exist.
She looks and sounds rather like Aisling Bea but, while Aisling is a top-class stand-up operating at the top of her game, Fern Brady is, as yet, just a reasonably decent stand-up with considerable room for improvement.
