Showing @ The Old Fire Station, Oxford 22-23 March

Thanks to the age of YouTube comedy, our increased need for fast and frothy paces seem to fit the sketch show format, yet they appear to be a dying breed. Shows like Family Guy have taken the style and pushed the genre into new realms. There’s still space for the sketch but their success rests firmly on the ability to avoid the faux pas of the genre: labouring jokes or letting the pace go flat.

Clocking in at just over two hours, Bulletproof Jest, from six-person Oxford based troupe The Dead Secrets, has a lot of time to fill and they do so with an eclectic pile of sketches ranging from a indictment of Paddington Bear by lesser known St. Pancras Bear to sperm boot-camp to space geese. The sketches are glued together by short films, highlights being ‘The inconvenience Store’, adventurers discovering The Cursed Toaster and the odd movie trailer.

With a sprinkling of Pythonesque moments, Bulletproof Jest offers the kind of characters you’d watch week after week such as an army General (Chris Sugden) who was fighting to keep a massive portion of the armies’ budget to conquer Space Geese – the terrible secret that could ruin the Earth. As a first production it shows a lot of potential, the creases need to be ironed out and the pace kicked back into a few of the scenes but the overriding tone is one of careful timing and attention to detail. Contending with mediums like YouTube which have made it possible for us to create our own compilations, The Dead Secrets remind us of the power of the sketch show: woven stories, intelligent scripting and the unraveling absurdity of the human mind. This troupe is one to watch and definitely more rewarding than watching kittens falling downstairs.