Lou Taylor is another in an increasingly long line of comedians who grew an audience through online sketches, finding a voice principally during the difficult lockdown period. Unlike many of those she leapt onto the stage as soon as she was able and has spent a few years and a few split bills building her way to her debut. The question is whether she’s as at home in the long-form format as she is in bitesize chunks. Her title is a great start. ‘Jeans and a nice top’ is really evocative, suggesting much but giving away little. The hour itself isn’t quite as dynamic. It demonstrates that Taylor is brilliant company for an hour, but this tale of growing up in the years straddling the millennium isn’t one of the more ambitious debuts of 2024.

Taylor is direct and composed in front of a crowd, possessed of the same warm, easy confidence that makes performers like Fiona Ridgewell, Lauren Pattison, and Louise Atkinson so easy to warm too. From the beginning she establishes the intimacy of a chat between friends. No easy feat, and necessary when she gets so bold as to ask a young woman in the crowd about her experiences with fingering. Her material itself is pure nostalgia; the sounds and sights of the ’90s and ’00s from someone looking back in a wiser, more jaded way from the future their young self was so excited to reach. It’s charming from the off, especially her description of an unforgettable day in the audience of Live & Kicking in 1997. Boyzone! The Spice Girls! Michael Buerk(?)!

Taylor intersperses her wistful reminiscences of Dream Phone and exploratory sexual encounters with some of her popular video sketches. There’s an inherent risk in lacing these into the show as it may come across as the performer having a lack of confidence in their stage presence. Fortunately, Taylor’s ultra-relaxed and chatty demeanour easily clears that hurdle. The skits themselves provide a nice punctuation and emphasis to her routines, an organic part of the whole package, and you can hardly blame her for showcasing the online content that has gone quite a way to growing an audience. Some work better than others, with ‘If adults dated like teenagers’ being a proper highlight. Less successful is the parody of tampon adverts, which were lampooned in a similar way at the time they were popular.

Structurally and thematically there’s also a sense of the familiar. ‘Jeans and a nice top’ feels cut from the same cloth as Rose Matafeo‘s Comedy Award-winning ‘Horndog‘ from back in those prelapsarian years before the plague. Both deal with roughly the same time period, albeit from a different participatory level – Matafeo something of a relative wallflower, and Taylor a comparatively gung-ho explorer – and both drink from the same Millennial pop-cultural well; a flurry of chart music, cultural ephemera, and embarrassing crushes. Fans of that show will be delighted with Taylor’s debut.

It’s all perfectly enjoyable and pleasant, even for those slightly older or younger than that generation. Those who perhaps just skim the outer edges of the cultural sandbox from which Taylor has constructed this particular castle can still get on board. Specificity is great, yet a show like this needs to draw in an audience beyond those it directly targets. Taylor manages this with her easy presence and by casting her experience as part of a universal coming-of-age tale that goes all the way back to Goethe‘s Young Werther; if Werther wore Burberry and was shit at fingering. But ‘Jeans and a nice top’ is just a little safe, like the sartorial choice of the title. A solid debut show, and one that deftly introduces Lou Taylor as a talent, but one that takes place in an almost visible comfort zone.

‘Jeans and a nice top‘ is at Pleasance Courtyard – Bunker Three until Sun 25 Aug 2024 (except Mon 12) at 20:30