Natalie Haynes - Run or Die

Published Thursday 18 August 2005 at 10:50 by Chris Wilson

Haynes batters her audience with a machine-gun bombardment of words, shot out at such great speed they seem like a echo in the eardrum. Coming out at an estimated 200 words a minute (that is four a second) she must get through around 12,000 words in her hour. This feeble male mind found it hard to keep pace with her verbal diarrhoea. The soporific effect was so great, after 30 minutes it felt like she was sitting on my eyelids.

This was a pity as there were some good material. Her takes on turning 30 and the etymology of the C-word were funny and refreshing.

However, it made you wince when Haynes joked she was going to get pregnant so she could have an abortion and post the dead foetus to a pro-Life campaigner.

And the whole show came across as a greatly extended club set with some dodgy material. Do we care about a sponsored school that almost no one, apart from Haynes, had heard of? And what was all that nonsense on parrots about?

It would be good to see her write an Edinburgh show on only one theme, and deliver it 10 percent slower. Less is more.