The barman is chugging back a cannon shell sized Red Bull in between pouring shots. He's trapped serving a round that never ends. Every time he totals up and asks for payment one of the recruitment girls asks for an additional brace of drinks. The other patrons at the nightclub are starting to get antsy. The final bill comes to over 200 quid. It goes on the company credit card.

The tables on the dance floor are laid out viking dining style. Twenty-man lengths with half of any group facing the wrong way unless they wanna twist their neck 90 degrees for 90 minutes. They all have Christmas hats. The sweatshop Santa head gear are a nice little compliment laid out on every place setting. I give mine to the bouncer. There must be about a dozen staff nights out dominating the room. We are seated next to the biggest, drunkest one. The drinks must have started in meeting room number one long before the out-of-offices were set. If they cared a jot about the show, they might notice their sightlines to the stage are terrible.

It is the first Friday night in December in a market town. I'm not going to name the gig, to protect the innocent. I've known at least four separate mainstream comedy promoters who have crawled into this high street meat market and booked it. I have never seen much effort made to improve the awkward layout for a live comedy gig over any of the 15 years. I'm guessing most pro acts write it off as the unpleasant little unkillable money spinner that it is. The room has all the personality of an uncooked hen's egg. It has the underlit darkness and tight claustrophobia of a battery chicken's arsehole. At the rear of the stage there is a vinyl marketing pop-up stand that acts as a branded backdrop. It looks like it wants to call the Samaritans. Sophisticated comedy comes here to die. Work. Work. Work. The stand-up equivalent of mining the pit, man and boy.

The MC has the proven skillset and decades of experience to overcome the inherent handicaps of the set-up. He can't be arsed. His opening salvo is so distracted and underpowered one wonders whether he has written the gig off and is just mentally composing the invoice for payment in his head. Or maybe he knows the opener he is about to bring on is destined to suffer a death so he is saving the big guns until after they are put out of their misery. Maybe he resents her TV credit when he has toiled over at this end of the circuit for all his career with little to show but a new black suit every couple of years and a middling Chortle review.

He is not wrong to lowball though. The 20-minute monologue the opening act puts the festive party animals through might struggle to find purchase even under optimum performing conditions. The only surprise is how little the audience reacts beyond the occasional polite whisper of laughter. One might assume heckling or at least a rash of low-level chatter would break out but in the main they endure the gimcrack opener with a resigned acceptance. They are frankly shockingly polite at the lack of entertainment.

The second half is stronger; I'm tempted to name the headliner just because he does such a fine job of recharging the room and delivering guffaws. But to do that might make obvious the two problematic acts on the line up and it is British Comedy Guide policy to report about the shows but never negatively review.

What's the point of the past half a dozen paragraphs then? I think they fairly illustrate what a depressing tundra the UK comedy scene resets to over the Christmas Office Party season. Even if you were to market more imaginative shows to just those of us who would never be caught dead in a Squid Game themed Christmas Jumper, our social obligations are too busy to seek out any of the good stuff in a crammed December of family and catch-ups.

Top Secret Comedy Club near Covent Garden is just as dark and dingy as that unnamed nightclub. The stairwell needs a good sweep and the toilets... well, allegedly they've been refurbished...!? Here's the marked difference though - the 200 or so kids and tourists crammed in, shoulder to Stone Island shoulder - they want to be here. They cheer when the lights go down. They whoop with familiarity at impresario Mark Rothman's standard nervy, sleazy patter. There's a loyal throng here who know exactly what they've bought a ticket for and they are buzzing for it... herpes, bogs and all!

It is nice to revisit a genuine live comedy success story. I remember when the club used to squat in a wood panelled, African cultural centre and source its punters from flyered tourists. That was never going to be a sustainable business model. Offering one of the best value live shows in Zone 1 London is the winning ticket. The buzz in the venue is undeniable. And if you leave a decent online review about the toilets after the show you get a free shot. Who cares about an unmopped floor? Or yesterday's stagnant drink dregs hiding under your seat? In terms of laughter, Top Secret is a deal, a steal, the sale of the century. Rothman's huckstering makes him the PT Barnum of man and mic stand-up. The greatest showman just needs to hire a cleaning crew.

Venue resident Nico Yearwood opens the show. There are unifying lines about his native Barbados and their unlikely approach to international intervention. His pasty white girlfriend conjures up some beautiful imagery. There's some sturdy "rule of three" construction to a joke about English family members mispronouncing his name.

He must have just got to the basement seconds before walking on stage. It is fair to say that when he went into the front row, he lost the audience. Asking exactly the same line of questioning as the MC to one couple drew gasps and silence. Groundhog Day - we had witnessed each and every question and each and every answer only a few minutes before. We were all on tenterhooks as to when he would pull out of this unrewarding deja vu chitchat. He didn't need to prime the audience with interaction, they were ready for his material... And watching a decent comedian parrot the host's options took a lot of the shine off of just how "magical" crowd work actually is.

And who wouldn't be on board listening to Yearwood's relaxed, impish drawl. His closing routine, about how ugly British people are, skipped along a tightrope of tongue in cheek audience baiting. His post Brexit solution of allowing freedom of movement for beauty was inspired. Yearwood had the right stuff for his home team, he should have just hit us with another 5 of such material rather than leaning into back and forth that went nowhere but faux pas.

I'll tell any fool who cares to listen what a massive fan of Carl Donnelly's I am. I've rated him higher than all other London comedians ever since his Laughing Horse New Comedy win pre-Credit Crunch (remember the Credit Crunch?). I wouldn't miss him during his slick Mock The Week / Big Agency years. And I've fully embraced his vegan / yurt / crystals evolution. The missus and I still quote his "cooking Christmas Dinner for the parents" bit whenever the arranging of that December meal looms. You probably have a different choice? The man has forgotten more hit routines than most comedians ever get working.

The reason - he is inarguably himself on stage. Mr Natural. Voice. Truth. Funny Bones. You are in no doubt he can spin any subject matter he deigns to turns his hand to into threads of pure gold. Whether off-the-cuff or intricately crafted narrative, he just makes us laugh.

Hard gush over, his latest banger is about Original Source Shower Gels. The Top Secret crowd lost all sense of decorum with it. We all knew what flavour he was building towards and you could literally feel the people on either side of you losing their shit in anticipation of what was coming.

And his description of the end result was economic perfection.

He might not be the first act to talk about the surprising after effect of this particular product but he's swooped in on it at exactly the nexus point where the general populous have now all experienced its rather unique reaction. That green bottle sitting next to your shampoo and bubble bath has been elevated into comedy wonderment. The equivalent of Alun Cochrane's Peach On a Train and maybe given the right exposure it could sit alongside Micky Flanagan's Out Out.

I get the feeling there was even more to that routine before he was flashed off and the show tied off. Time constraint and the churn of audiences is the only true negative to the Top Secret model. Still, I wouldn't want to miss Donnelly's tale of a genuinely shit tube journey that switches from storytelling to observation to "local" to small p political commentary. Donnelly seems focused currently on just what a shower of shit we, the great British public, are. His comments on Scribbler, machete attacks, face masks and New Zealand's Prime Minister all chime with the exact people he is critiquing. And he tops every prosecution with some well pitched facial punctuation. His shit eating grin when handing his mother a rude birthday card is both mock innocence and sarcastic mugging of the highest order.

A locale I could at least take my mother to is the Leith Arches. Gilded Balloon books a monthly Thursday night show here and I reckon their hygiene certificate is immaculate. And considering the mixed bill show is in a converted car garage built into a railway arch... that's saying something. Saying everything... really.

After a month of "old hands" it was the two newer middle spots who piqued my interest on this particularly freezing December night. Amanda Dwyer ambles on without purpose. The embodiment of depression. Her slow, jerky monologue suggests she doesn't know what she is doing. Most of the laughter in the first half of her 10 comes from awkwardness. The audience trying to get their heads around the stop-start, directionless autobiography unfolding at a demotivated snail's pace. There's a part of me that suspected she was knowingly working the silences, relying on the inevitability that the crowd would start filling in the gaps with their own nervous reactions. Suddenly, at the point of no return, gorgeously written yet bleak lines - about her leaky tit, being press ganged into prayer in Aberdeen, and a bang on the ceiling - start paying out. What started as a bunch of half muttered set-ups in need of finessed punchlines gave way to five minutes of quite sophisticated laughs. Dwyer's voice is laboured and the tension produces eventual chuckles but then she reveals she is actually quite an adept writer of jokes and you wish we got to spend even more of that time with her. It all coalesces into a promising 10; there's a few potent paths you can see her naturally developing along. I certainly would like to keep tabs on how her anti-comedy leanings survive over the next couple of years.

If Dwyer was the tortoise, then Chris Weir is the hare. This was a really tight middle set, all bloat eliminated. His stagey, overly scripted style is very smarmy. And Weir preyed on our more liberal sensibilities a tad too hard. Weaker jokes are framed in a backstory of a conservative gig that really didn't like him or the material. The implication being we must be with the homophobes if we don't lap up the less sure-footed stuff. No concept outstays our welcome though as it tossed out underhand in snack size chunks. If a non-sequitur didn't work then at least it came good in a patient callback. Weir has nice talent for a curveball, and his detached superior tone consistently wrong foots us in a way that stopped the trick becoming one note. He was awarded most laughs on the night.

A fitting metaphor on exit. A row of exercise bikes greeted the comedy crowd as they made their way out into the snow. They are being set up in the railway arch for tomorrow's keep fit class. January is upon us.

Nico Yearwood appears regularly at Top Secret Comedy Club near Covent Garden.

Carl Donnelly co-hosts the Two Vegan Idiots Podcast (TVI) with Julian Deane.

Gilded Balloon at Leith Arches is back monthly from Thursday the 23rd of February 2023.