Jo Caulfield, Chorley Little Theatre, 24 September 2011

Stand up comedienne Jo Caulfield will remember Chorley for two reasons. The audience rewriting one of her jokes - and the Hartwood Hall Hotel.

The Hartwood certainly made an impression on the TV and Radio 4 regular as she stopped off in Chorley for her 'Cruel to be Kind' tour. Imagining a boutique hotel set in rolling grounds and not a Beefeater, she drove round and round the roundabout on the A6 and thought: "This can't be it." She was underwhelmed. "No Sky TV. And only one plugpoint. So no TV if you want to put the kettle on."

Jack Daniels and coke in hand, she started her 90 minute set at the Chorley Little Theatre complaining that a younger comedian was lazy for suggesting vodka and Red Bull got alcohol into the bloodstream more quickly. "Why can't he get to the bar two hours earlier like the rest of us?"

In an evenly paced set that had the audience laughing out loud throughout, Jo revealed her love of TV reality shows and her dislike of self service supermarket checkouts and the way people in love talk to their new partners. The highlight of the set was her longer observational material, including the story of bumping into someone in HMV that she recognised very slightly, meeting his fiancée at dinner and then realising she didn't know the couple at all.

After the interval, Jo asked the audience for marks out of ten on some new gags. For the joke "Don't you hate it when people offer you food to show off the fact that they've been abroad?", they even contributed a better punchline, suggesting "Have a slice of Arctic Roll" should finish with "it's from Iceland" rather than Tesco. Ms Caulfield was suitably impressed. "You're brilliant, Chorley."

The set finished with her running through some of the audience's pet hates (men, dog waste, Mormons), a list she admitted was much more irreverent than those of other venues she'd played, who had concentrated on the global economic crisis. "You're very angry, Chorley."

Hopefully memories of Chorley and the gag that the Little Theatre audience rewrote will stay with her. From her caustic tweets the following day, memories of the Hartwood certainly will.

Jenny Eclair, Chorley Little Theatre, 19 March 2011

Jenny Eclair sold out two nights at the Chorley Little Theatre on the strength of her appearance on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here in 2010, but the hit ITV show received nary a mention. Any youngsters in the audience looking for anecdotes about sitting round the camp fire with Ant and Dec had their hopes quickly dashed: “I’ve got a message for any children in the audience tonight – f*** off!”

Instead the Grumpy Old Woman and one time Perrier Award winning comedienne gave her mainly female audience an X-rated analysis of what its like to be middle aged and entering the menopause. And so began a show which, although entitled Old Dog, New Tricks, could just as easily have been called Bodily Functions. In a set that was definitely not for the squeamish, no physical act or scatological description was left unexplored as Eclair brought gasps of shock and gales of laughter from her mainly female audience.

Identifying the men in the audience as designated drivers brought along so that the women could get drunk, Eclair talked about passing wind on the bus, passing wind whilst having a massage and whether middle aged women should gang together clutching their private parts to intimidate hoodies in the part of south east London where she now lives.

Eclair hails from Lytham St Annes and shared with her audience fond but entirely unrepeatable memories of spending her formative years dispensing sexual favours to teenage boys. Her parents still live in Lytham and were the subject of some of her material but Geoff, her partner of 28 years, was the butt of more jokes. We learnt that watching the Tour de France on TV he fell off the sofa pretending to pedal along with the riders, whilst plans for a Vegas wedding were abandoned because he couldn’t differentiate between a serving spoon and a dessert spoon. Breakfast in bed served by Geoff is also over rated (“wrong type of marmalade”), as is oral sex.

The female obsession with removing body hair, the wardrobe habits of female weather presenters (“I don’t want my weather girl in a spangly top looking like she’s been clubbing all night”) and the delights of the Per Una range of clothing from M&S all received the Éclair treatment. This grumpy old woman likes the self service section at her local Sainsbury because it makes shoplifting easier, but feels her frequent shopper status should entitle her to a VIP Nectar card and a free glass of champagne. And she rather likes Booths – “it’s the sort of place that, if you fainted while you were there, they’d make sure your skirt was pulled down so that you looked decent.”

Eclair is a Northern lass with middle class pretensions that have softened as she gets older: “I used to arrive in a place hoping to score some Class A drugs. Now I hope they’ve got a nice floral clock.” Few of her jokes could be repeated in a family newspaper and Jenny Eclair is unlikely to be offered the freedom of Lytham St Annes any time soon, but if she toned down her act in order to do so, the fans who packed the Chorley Little Theatre would not forgive her.

Dan Antapolski, Chorley Little Theatre, 18 November 2010

Despite a number of appearances on Radio 4 and Channel 4, stand up comedian Dan Antapolski is not a household name. This was reflected in the number of seats sold for his performance at Chorley Little Theatre, which was only one third full. But Antapolski didn’t let the rows of empty seats faze him, and turned the intimate nature of the gig to his advantage.

Resplendent in beard and multi coloured jumper, he began by making conversation with an Austrian lady on the front row: “Viennese architecture not good enough for you so you thought you’d come to Chorley, eh?”

He performed for 90 minutes in total, with a slow paced opening hour. His humour might best be described as surreal and it took the audience a few minutes to tune into his understated delivery. Pondering whether to describe a female audience member as having black hair or black hairs won them over, but amongst the good one liners (“I’ve just been reading the prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – it’s called Piglet”) there were periods where the tempo dropped.

The punchier 30 minute post interval set worked better. Antapolski returned to the stage wrestling a pantomime spider he’d found in his dressing room and with a gag deconstructing the meaning of Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman No Cry.’ (“Does he mean he doesn’t have a woman? Or that she shouldn’t cry? What was he on about?”) Linguistic analysis seemed to be his strength, as he then imagined his 6 year old daughter querying why the Jack and Jill of nursery rhyme fame didn’t drill a well at the bottom of the hill to avoid falling down the hill later.

Apart from a brief foray into political comedy (“The BNP get seen off at the General Election. And they get their revenge with that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico”) his young daughters were the source for much of his material.

His show finished with what proved to be the highlight of his set, an energetic “Laser Rap” about the joys of owning a laser tape measure with dry ice giving the full Top Of The Pops studio effect and beams of red light bouncing off various audience members.

Billy Connolly started out as a singer whose in between chat expanded until it became his act. With Dan Antopolski, a few more songs might be the key to his career taking off.