Big mouth.

Byline: By Gavin Allen  South Wales Echo 

Typical of a woman who calls her latest show I Don't Think So stand-up comic Gina Yashere has got a mouth that struggles to match only her personality for size.

Yet even she was rendered monosyllabic by her last mini-tour - the military bases of Iraq.

'It was a fantastic experience,' she said with uncharacteristic restraint.

'They are away from their families and miss home so it's something I wanted to do. They were really appreciative of us risking ourselves.'

Did it feel dangerous?

'Oh God yeah,' she squealed, cranking up that powerful Bethnel Green mouth.

'We were constantly in flak jackets and helmets, accompanied by armed guards and flew everywhere by helicopter which is very dangerous.

'The one time we had to drive to a gig we weren't able to come back by the same road because it was blown up a few hours after we had used it.

'We did 11 gigs over there including one at Saddam's former palace in Basra but all the chandeliers had been taken down so there weren't any diamonds I could nick.'

Yashere, 36, was also quietened briefly by a motorbike accident she suffered while out on manoeuvres, flipping a quad bike in the desert and sustaining a nasty head injury, but she promises the full Gina effect when she hits the Cardiff stage

'I'll definitely be talking about Big Brother because I'm addicted.

'I'm loving Glyn and Pete at the moment, Richard's great and Leah's good but she cries too much.'

That last quote illustrates my problem with Yashere.

Comedians are rarely funny to interview but they are usually highly intelligent and/or perceptive people.

I'm not denying Yashere either of those qualities as a person but professionally she has a tendency to simply commentate lazily on pop culture.

You can't escape feeling that Yashere trades on that huge personality and the fact that she is a black woman in stand up (a very rare beast) rather than producing genuine material.

'I have had a lot of criticism,' she said wearily, her temper understandably raising. 'But I am the kind of comic people either love or hate and all I would say is, if you don't like me then don't come to the show.'

Her attitude to her work is inevitably shaped by experience and with many microphone years behind her you sense her enthusiasm for maximum effort has been hit - she genuinely believes that her career has been held back by subtle institutional racism.

'TV people are very frightened to take any risks and booking a black woman is unfortunately still seen as a risk.

'At the same time these TV people have quotas to fill and then need black faces on screen so they call me but I know that if another black woman gets a TV show then I probably won't get any more work because that quota will have been filled.'