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.
It's not so much stand-up as a conversational run-through of how she came to be here, 29 and worried about hitting 30, and of her career to date. We see a montage of pictures on the large on-stage screen, ending with a video clip of Atack parachuting into the jungle and screaming every inch of the way.
The show itself, though, is short on anecdotes about her experience, but the I'm a Celebrity... winner, Harry Redknapp, and fellow contestants Anne Hegerty and Nick Knowles get brief mentions (and spot-on impersonations). Atack has clearly inherited some of her mum's (Kate Robbins) talent in that regard.
She talks at length about how she seems to spend most of her time going to weddings and hen parties, and the irritation of being in the hen-weekend WhatsApp groups, which always have a passive-aggressive organiser constantly demanding money for the “fun” things they are planning to do.
There's a graphic that explains how to discover how mean your friends are with their money, which doesn't make too much sense and doesn't have a payoff.
The best line of the show, meanwhile, follows a detailed set-up about a dope smoker thinking she is superior to those women in the loos who offered ketamine to Atack – “That's literally the pot calling the ketamine black” - and doesn't land with the oomph it deserves.
She does a section on the true meaning of emojis, and Ariana Grande's lyrics are deconstructed – cue another cracking impersonation. One lengthy anecdote concerns Atack going to the Brit Awards, meeting a chap she fancied and ending up knickerless when she got home, worried that her pants might end up on eBay.
Towards the end, the show becomes more a call to arms as Atack discusses how women struggle with body image in the age of Instagram – which she admits she is a fan of. This section has the air of a TED talk, and has few laughs, but then Atack has a good callback to end the show on a positive note.
I found most of Atack's material gently amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny but the audience – largely twentysomething women – did, and much of their response was the laughter of recognition. Some of Atack's appeal depends on whether you fall into that demographic, but her sheer likeability – as seen in the jungle – drives much of the show
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