With a Sabatier tongue secreted behind a layer of slap, Pam Ann is a cute comedy character who has settled in for the long haul. At the start of the decade, the Australian comic Caroline Reid's Sixties-style sexpot was doing short sets in gay clubs.

Now, with a British Airways ad campaign behind her, this spoof trolley dolly is heading to the end of her latest tour of big regional theatres — with a month at Edinburgh and two nights at the Hammersmith Apollo still to come.

So her career is in full flight. But Pam is looking pretty jet lagged. Maybe it's the long tour. Maybe it's not knowing where to go with an amusing but essentially one-note character.

Reid has never been a great one for structuring her shows, which was OK over a short-haul cabaret turn, where she got by on her snarling wit and primary-colour fashion sense. Over two hours, her reliance on working the crowd looks less like inclusiveness and more like having no material.

However, she has prepared some in-flight entertainment — crafty clips from the disaster film Airport 1975, digitally doctored to include a sozzled Pam in the frame. There are glimpses of some of her other characters and a mercifully short live turn by Lilly, a toothy Chinese air hostess, that would make Benny Hill blanch.

But Reid's heart doesn't look to be in this. Not tonight, anyway. She's quick. But she's not so sharp that she can sustain a two-hour show by rubbing up against her passengers.

“Oh, I love my gays,” she says with typical testiness as she identifies her “frequent flyers” in the front row. But bringing people up on stage to talk about themselves plays a lot like the boring chatty bits from The Generation Game, with references to “fingering” inserted to spice things up.

Reid is pandering to the largest demographic in her audience, which is airline workers. Her best jokes are in-jokes. And when she's not plying sweeping statements about different cabin crews — Virgin Atlantic are sluts, we're told; Lufthansa are eerily efficient — she's being smutty. “Which part of the cabin were you working?” she asks one punter. “Economy,” he replies. “Economy. You like it it up the back end, then?”

This can feel like a corporate gig that the public have been let into through computer error. Reid has presence, and her tart one-liners keep the small talk rolling along.

But she has reached that point in her career where she won't trot out too many old observational routines about flying, but hasn't found much to fill in the gap. She carries the crowd with her most of the way. But Pam Ann is flying on only one engine.

On tour to Sunday (next show Saturday June 7, Gordon Craig Theatre, Stevenage, box office: 0870 0131030). Then Thursday July 31 to Sunday Aug 24, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

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