Sketch comedy is tricky to pull off, especially when you’re just starting out. It takes a wealth of imagination to create and manipulate characters and then ditch them almost instantly. Of course, if you follow the formula set down by Catherine Tate and Little Britain, you can get hours from one character if you can find a zinger of a catchphrase to go with them. But Oxford trio The Awkward Silence — made up of writer Ralph Jones and performers Thom Short and Dan License — have vowed to approach the genre with different values.

This Is What Chaos Smells Like, is their first set as a trio and the one, they hope, will get them noticed by those without OX postcodes.

During their two-hour show in The Theatre at Headington, they get through an astonishing amount of material, not only performing sketches, but showing videoed material and playing pre-recorded sketches over the PA. This builds momentum nicely and prevents minds from wandering.

Not all the routines come off. Some are very good indeed, including a side-splitting scene with angry Mr Men and some sharp send ups of talent show TV. Others are less good, with their parody of Hollywood blockbusters, Yoghurt Man, feeling a bit like something from the Scary Movie franchise, and their spoof documentary on the whereabouts of Tom Selleck felt borrowed from other performers. Most of the time they get it right: it’s never pant-wettingly funny, but nor can you guess the punch lines from the second the sketch starts. Jones’ writing is inventive: he just needs to do more of it.

There’s work to do for The Awkward Silence, but there’s also a lot of promise too. This lot could be good — very good in fact.