Want to get your Horne on?

Alex Horne is something of a mystery to me. He’s little known except by regular explorers of the comedy circuit and yet seems to have the phonebook of an A-list celebrity comedian. Here’s a man whose shows pull in the likes of Tim Minchin, Harry Hill and Jimmy Carr to name but a few, and yet who himself is rarely seen on TV or heard on radio. But if there were any question marks hanging over his comic credentials, his Section does more than answer them.

The Horne Section is a musical mash-up cabaret extraordinaire, where maestro Alex Horne invites comedians and other entertainers alike to work their art with the able, and optional, assistance of his several-piece band. Never flustered by the spontaneous suggestions of the audience, they flex their embrasures and plectrum-fingers in the opening moments, asking for a rhythm, key and two well known tunes, before seamlessly melding it all together in a flurry of musical talent.

With a loose structure around proceedings, the Horne Section guarantees to throw up something unique, in the main due to its invitational bill. Fresh from a stint on the Edinburgh Fringe, where the show was one of the most lauded, the Criterion Theatre is a slightly more restrictive setting than that of the Spiegeltent, which had the much more relaxed and comfortable feel of a comedy-club-cum-garden-party. The product is nevertheless of the same high quality, most of the acts are worth seeing on their own merits – Tim Minchin, Josie Long and Beardyman are all appearing in tomorrow’s show alone.

Starting late in central London, the Horne Section puts a nice icing on the cake of a Saturday night, allowing punters to grease their own funny bones before they get tickled at the Criterion, and how. Little compares to the Horne Section and anything that does falls a long way short of this paradoxically polished yet spontaneous production.

The Horne Section runs every Saturday at the Criterion on Piccadilly until November 26