The beauty of the Comedy Festival for me is that its greatest delights are often unexpected: you buy tickets for Jason Byrne, Reginald D. Hunter or Nina Conti and largely, you know what you’re going to get; you buy tickets for first-timers and you takes your chances – sometimes you lose, but sometimes you back a winner.

Take Poet Laureate Telia Nevile for example. Nevile, tall and slim, at first glance seems too timid to impress, but she takes the stage, draws a deep breath and plunges into a slide show accompanied by a celebration of words, exquisite turns of phrase and wistful and ironic poetry. In only the second night of her first full-length solo Festival show, she was in full command of her material, her meagre props and the controls of her projector. Not all the comedians I’ve seen this year could claim that!

Her illustrated journey round the world – about 20 well chosen slides – is merely the backdrop to the poetic journey of the heart she pours out in her verses. She describes her odyssey as ‘an epic freefall of discovery held together with the divine glue of poetry.’ There’s a sentence you’re not going to hear in a Wil Anderson rant or a Felicity Ward ramble!

The poems are delightful, from teenage angst ‘Blue Light, Green Romance,’ to bittersweet love songs and a safari which needed audience participation after the absence of a drummer – Nevile tells us in another felicitous phrase – ‘left her percussively bereft.’ It was a charming, short program (only 35 minutes) of clever and perceptive spoken word. It’s not for the boozy, Hughesy set but it’s so refreshingly and winsomely different it could well be an early contender for a Best Newcomer award.

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