‘Not My Finest Hour’ is a tremendous name for a show, a self-deprecating play on the length of stand-up sets, crossed with an accurate description of the subject matter of Alexandra Haddow’s Fringe debut. It concerns ‘the worst thing she’s willing to admit to’, that being having an affair with a married man 18 years older than her when she was in her twenties.
Great name, nice idea, but there’s a frustrating lack of substance to Haddow’s show, in which she opts for a hop, skip and jump through her dating history rather than really drill into the subject at hand.
There are some good stories, especially the one about her ill-starred trip to London with her school boyfriend to lose their virginities at a weirdly fancy hotel. But while Haddow has got these yarns polished into sparkling jewels of gossip, the lack of introspection or self-analysis is a real shame. We learn the guy she was seeing was a total rat and had posh wine, but we never know what Haddow really thought about the relationship beyond the fact she always knew it was a bad idea. Not every autobiographical show needs to be ‘Nanette’, but Haddow ultimately feels limited by her low ambitions for her own material.