Struggling for comedy work under lockdown, Dave Gorman developed a sideline as a cryptic crossword setter, for this newspaper and others. It makes sense: his screen-based standup has always been animated by dorky compulsiveness and pattern-finding in unlikely places. That much is certainly true of new show PowerPoint to the People – but it’s not Gorman’s best work. As ever, he lavishes disproportionate attention and energy on vanishingly trivial subjects. But he doesn’t always find the trick or flourish to transcend triviality and make his geeky inquiries worthwhile. There’s lots of great stuff around the margins, of course: at 51, Gorman has lost none of the zest he brings to his noodling in the nooks that the rest of us overlook. But his big set-pieces feel paltry. Too much of the first half is devoted to a deep-dive into the TV show Inside the Factory, and host Gregg Wallace’s apparently childlike demeanour – which Gorman strains to establish. The show culminates in a stunt based around a novelty hotel, the secrets of which Gorman swears us to protect. No problem, alas: they aren’t exciting enough to spill. There’s more meaning to be found in his informative routine about the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and more laughs in the section on how to spell the letters of the alphabet. Rich pickings can be found, too, when he talks crossword-setting – an art form in which his imagination feels so at home, I began daydreaming of a whole Dave Gorman show constructed in the style of a cryptic clue. This one, for all its occasional skilful callbacks, is more like a sequence of free-associating bits: about Tom Hanks, about weighing crisp packets, about our host kicking himself in the balls. You won’t feel short-changed: the show is two and a half hours long, and several sequences (the trademark “found poem” about billionaires in space is a standout) will delight Gorman’s fans. But there are occasions, too, when Gorman’s nerdy obsessiveness and meticulous presentational skills are deployed in the service of – well, not a great deal.