The Hob - Chambers & Nettleton, Glazz Campbell and Andrew Bird 22/08/09

I've been to The Hob quite a few times now, and it makes for a very good night out. Opposite Forest Hill station, the downstairs pub is nice and friendly, and the upstairs comedy venue (with its own bar, an important fact) is great for any type of comedy that you fancy seeing.

Saturday was the first time to the hob since starting to work through my list. The evening kicked off with a realy good set by Chambers & Nettleton. I'm not entirely sure how the describe this duo of feisty northern women, but I thoroughly enjoyed their slightly mental banter and I do love it when you can see that the acts are enjoying themselves too... I think that really helps with the feel of the gig.

Next act up was a newcomer going by the name of Taff. He only did a short set, perhaps about 5 minutes, but it showed good promise. And you can definitely see what he means when he describes himself as Marty Feldman's Afghani cousin. Taff was followed by Glazz Campbell who had a bit of a hesitant start before getting into his stride and enjoying some good (read bad) puns.

Headlining the evening was Andrew Bird. And for some reason, I'm having a bit of a blank mind as to what he was actually like...but I did laugh a lot.

MCing the whole shebang was Mark Felgate, who did the job very well... working with a small audience he was forced to pick on a few audience members repeatedly, but did this in a way that didn't feel intimidating at all. He also through in a few clever little ventriloquism moments that worked well and I would be really interested in seeing him do a proper set.

Downstairs at the King's Head - Barry Cryer & Ronnie Golden

I've recently developed a plan to visit all London comedy venues and this kicked off yesterday, taking us out to the deepest darkest reaches of North London - Hornsey in fact to Downstairs at the King's Head. We knew we had definitely reached the right venue when we walked in and saw Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden sat at a table together, discussing set lists.

The King's Head is quite a nice pub (and makes a good fish finger sandwich) and the comedy venue itself, as you would guess from the title, is downstairs. Quite an intimate venue, and I would recommend getting there when the doors open to ensure good seats (we were sat right at the front, and it was marvellous).

For those who don't know, Barry and Ronnie often get together to do a comedy show based on a combination of funny songs, Barry's marvellous collection of jokes and Ronnie's infinitely malleable voice. The end result is something absolutely hillarious and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone ... they're heading up to the Fringe shortly, if you are there make them a must (they're on at the Gilded Balloon).

Yesterday's set, a preview for the Fringe, was a good combination of old favourite songs (such as Stannah Stairlift and Peace and Quiet) and newer material as well. It was actually a rescheduled gig, Barry having been ill for the previous planned date but that didn't slow him down at all ("But then," he tells us, "I'm a hypochondriac...my gynecologist told me so"). The songs are hillarious, and their interaction between Barry & Ronnie is marvellous. And watch out for Ronnie's yodelling.

If you can't make it to see them, spend a tenner and get the album (Rock and Droll), it's worth every penny.

A comedy lesson

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Driven to laughter

So, only a few days after suggesting Stewart Lee is "bitterly angry at TV executives", and especially those involved with BBC2, there he was appearing in the first of his new six-part series 'Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle' on - you guessed it - BBC2.

As has been said elsewhere, credit to the Beeb for giving him the freedom to make what is to all intents and purposes a straight stand-up show (last night's sketches were a relatively unsubstantial garnish to the main feast) - and for appreciating the value of his characteristic pauses and stretched gags, rather than imposing obvious abbreviations or cuts.

I witnessed Lee roadtesting the vast majority of last night's material - about books, and specifically the new genre of "celebrity hardbacks" - in October, when he was unfairly upstaged by a surprise guest headlining appearance by Eddie Izzard. On that occasion, I complained that I'd heard most of Izzard's routine trotted out on a repeat of 'The Graham Norton Show' the previous night, so in a way it's ironic that Lee was repeating himself last night - but, personally speaking, the difference is simple: Izzard's material wasn't particularly great, whereas Lee's was. Hence the discovery that he also seems to have mined '41st Best Stand-Up Ever!' for a forthcoming episode is reason for rejoicing rather than disappointment.

As Lee himself would concede (and indeed has), though, he's not to everyone's taste, and here's one amusing dissenting voice. I particularly like the way the key points are handily emboldened, just in case you haven't the time to read the whole review - presumably because you're halfway through 'Harry Potter And The Tree Of Nothing' and want to get it finished before the film comes out...

And what are those key points, exactly? That Lee's comedy is "satire for snobs". That "My [reviewer Sally McIlhone's] dad is a better comedian than Stewart Lee" (given his choice of "surly, arrogant, laboured" as an endorsement in the past, that one could well appear on a future poster). And that Chris Moyles and Jeremy Clarkson, the primary targets of the show, are "sardonic talents" who "incidentally, are immeasurably funnier than Lee".

Needless to say, it's reviews like that that illustrate just how much we need him back on the idiot box.

Get thee to a Munnery show

SIMON MUNNERY / JOHN LEAN, 26TH JANUARY 2009, OXFORD CELLAR

"I ain't saying she's a gold-digger ... but she's got a beard, carries a pickaxe, lives in the 1930s and is always going on about 'them there hills'." As deadpan opening gags go, it's a beauty and gets John Lean (at least I think that's his name, the internets having been of precious little use in verifying it) off to a flying start. Unfortunately, the rest of his material just isn't up to the same standard, and the gaps between laughs are too long. There is some comedy gold in them there hills, but it needs panning out.

Though Lean tries to incorporate his nervousness and nerdiness into his onstage persona, they're both evidently genuine. The former academic is now a teacher and spends some time sharing his ideas for inappropriately cruel and humiliating punishments for unruly pupils before returning to song lyrics for inspiration, noting that the most remarkable thing about Sir Mix-A-Lot's 'I Like Big Butts' isn't his predilection for plump rumps but his declaration "I cannot lie". OK, so lyrics aren't exactly an unmined seam as far as stand-up goes (think Ed Byrne's famous dissection of Alanis Morissette's 'Ironic' for starters), but if he took his cue from Richard Herring and had the confidence to dwell on his observations longer and push them a bit further, Lean really might be something to write home about.

In between the acts the international students beside me animatedly debate whose country has contributed the best philosophers. Not your usual beered-up crowd baying for knob gags, then, but I suppose this IS Oxford, after all. Still, it's a testament to regular compere Rob Broderick's powers of persuasion that only a few minutes later he's got a woman with a pearl necklace commanding another audience member to join him in a pint-downing race.

Within comedy circles, Simon Munnery is a well-established figure, and has been for years; outside them, mention his name and you're more than likely to receive a blank "Who?" in response. Well, here's who...

The creator of the eccentric stand-up characters Alan Parker: Urban Warrior and The League Against Tedium in the 90s, Munnery drew upon the latter for his BBC2 series 'Attention Scum!', which featured Kevin Eldon, Johnny Vegas and even Catherine Tate and which, in the farcical operatic scenes written by Richard Thomas, foreshadowed 'Jerry Springer: The Opera'. Despite being nominated for a Golden Rose of Montreux, the series was consigned to a graveyard slot close to midnight on Sundays and cancelled before it had even gone to air - much to the disgust of its producer, Stewart Lee, who still seems as bitterly angry at TV executives today as he did in his Guardian article of the time.

'Attention Scum!' was a frequently baffling blast of surrealism, so it's something of a surprise that, after a very short song, Munnery kicks off with a dose of observational comedy, reflecting on how tricky it is to know the correct distance from which it's acceptable to say hello to an approaching person, and the social awkwardness of getting it wrong.

It's quite a while since I last saw him live, at a Just The Tonic night in Nottingham, and the years seem to have changed him slightly - there's still the odd flash of absurdism, but it comes, for instance, in a song he's made up to get his kids eating cabbage. It's almost as though his children give him a continued excuse for silliness.

That said, Munnery was never one for simple clowning around, always fired with a sharp intelligence, and at times tonight he touches on some relatively sensitive and even dark subject matter: he walks a potential tightrope in demanding audience participation for a gleefully jaunty run through a satirical ditty about the credit crunch; a song about his cantankerous not-all-there gran has a tone somewhere between the mischievous and the slightly malicious; and he mentions his crippled hand, an unfortunate side-effect of his otherwise successful chemotherapy treatment, going on to claim that the things he was prescribed are marvellous and they can't be marketing them right - "or maybe they are - 'take drugs or you die'".

He's at his best when doing a Lee and examining his own art under the microscope. Holding up a piece of card with a Venn diagram used to explain Venn diagrams on it, he then tells of an Edinburgh Festival reviewer who described his show as "the closest comedy comes to modern art" - a very back-handed compliment, he feels, suggesting it was neither truly art or truly comedy, a point he illustrates with another Venn diagram: "Here's my show, towards the edge of the comedy circle, in the shit comedy, striving to cross the line into the art circle and become shit art"...

Leaving the venue at the end, I overhear a couple of punters grumbling mildly about the grubby fingerprints all over that piece of card, suggesting we've been entertained with well-worn material - it was all new to me personally, though, so I have no complaints and am just glad Munnery's still with us. He once said: "I could have been a boxer, like my father. He could have been a boxer too". He may not be a boxer, but he certainly seems to know how to roll with the punches.

Coarse fishing

RICHARD HERRING / BEN VAN DER VELDE, 1ST DECEMBER 2008, OXFORD CELLAR

(Ahem - er, yes, a little overdue, this one...)

For someone who's the regular compere elsewhere (the Shaggy Dog Comedy Store in west London), Ben Van der Velde seems rather nervy and a bit hesitant. It doesn't help, of course, that just when he's starting to settle into a groove a phone rings to jolt him out of it. How hard is it to take heed of the pre-gig announcement and afford the performers you - and, more importantly, others - have paid to see the decency of turning off your mobile?

The behatted Geordie evidently feels there's mileage to be had from his Jewishness (or at least feels expected to make some mileage out of it), saying that he doesn't tell jokes about the Holocaust "because there are funnier genocides" and that his Palestinian girlfriend has had her pubic hair waxed into a Gaza strip, but he's at his best when ruminating on the suggestive power of language - the one-word film review "Baffling" from a newspaper, Rick James being charged with "aggravated mayhem"...

Tonight's headline act Richard Herring isn't here to perform his 2008 Edinburgh show 'The Headmaster's Son' (that comes to Oxford in the spring) but to deliver a stand-up set that, it transpires, is so deliberately rude and provocative that it'd merit a firm clip around the lughole were the old man to be present.

He starts off innocuously enough, claiming that "The motto I choose to live my life by is 'My enemy's enemy is my friend'. But I'm my own worst enemy..." and going on to deliver a sequence of increasingly convoluted ripostes to his PE teacher's motto "There's no 'I' in 'team'" and the perverse logic apparently underlying it.

But after that - aside from a segment in which he rails about the stupid reasons people call 999 and the occasional references to being old and having a lifestyle that is pitiable rather than enviable (increasingly familiar these days in the wake of 'Oh Fuck, I'm 40') - it's pretty much what the Daily Mail would no doubt be inclined to label "a non-stop torrent of filth".

Particularly memorable is the section on the playground hand gestures of childhood which betray a fundamental misunderstanding of homosexual acts, Herring of course seizing the opportunity to suggest more realistic alternatives. He jokes of Baby P that his parents "could have at very least given him a name", basking in the nervous laughter of an audience wondering if it's too soon to be making comic capital out of tragedy before adding with a mischevious smirk "I've got worse" and alluding briefly to the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Even the concluding segment, in which he dissects a simple phrase or comment with trademark persistence and pedantry from every conceivable angle (and some you simply won't have conceived of) - think 'Someone Likes Yoghurt' - focuses on a lewd T-shirt slogan, "Give me head until I'm dead", with predictably unsavoury consequences.

So, what's the point? (With Herring there's nearly always a point, even if it's not immediately obvious.) Is it simply a matter of deliberately pushing the boundaries of taste for cheap laughs, or is there something more going on? The latter, inevitably. As much as he discomforts the lily-livered and offends liberal sensibilities, he still elicits plenty of laughs and, crucially, at one point suggests he's performing comedy "just like Bernard Manning, but in a postmodern way - I know what I'm saying is wrong". Cue chuckles - but then the question that, for me, cuts to the quick: "But does that make it better - or much, much worse?" That seems to reveal the whole show to be a clever critique of the sort of comedy that pleads irony as a defence for saying the unsayable - albeit while at the same time effectively performing the same trick - as well as a robust challenge to audience attitudes and complacency: think for a moment what you're laughing about - you shouldn't be finding it funny.

A set that subverts itself? You don't get that with Jason Manford.

Quote of the day

"Put them in context. The Telegraph did a bad review. They came on the very first night even though we said we didn't want press there. They were like: 'Well, we're going to try and fuck him up'. Clearly their agenda wasn't: 'Oh, I'm really looking forward to seeing Steve Coogan'. What do I think of the guy who wrote the review? I think he's a bit of a cunt to be honest but I don't stay awake at night worrying about it. We've had great reviews since. The Liverpool Echo didn't give us a good review because we didn't have screens up, which was a technical error. And Scousers hate Mancunians and the feeling's mutual. All the northern cities that aren't maudlin have enjoyed it. We know it's a good show."

Steve Coogan on the critical reception afforded to his latest show.

Now, bearing in mind my own review of 'Alan Partridge And Other Less Successful Characters' was on balance positive, there's a lot of guff in here. Let's unpack it.

"They came on the very first night even though we said we didn't want press there."

That's ridiculous. If the show's deemed good enough for an audience paying in the region of £40 a ticket, then it should be good enough to be withstand the critics. If, as Coogan's suggesting, it wasn't quite ready, that's not something those punters should have had to fork out for.

"They were like: 'Well, we're going to try and fuck him up'. Clearly their agenda wasn't: 'Oh, I'm really looking forward to seeing Steve Coogan'."

I can imagine it must be frustrating to feel reviewers have a hidden (or not-so-hidden) agenda, but to the outsider it can look like paranoia, evidence of a persecution complex - particularly when there certainly are aspects of the show that merit criticism.

"What do I think of the guy who wrote the review? I think he's a bit of a cunt to be honest but I don't stay awake at night worrying about it."

This is especially bizarre. Either he's knowingly playing up to the caricatured Coogan of the behind-the-scenes footage of 'The Man Who Thinks He's It', or that fictionalised character wasn't actually so much of a caricature after all. What's next - will he try attacking said critic by swinging a large ball of plasticine with fish hooks set in it into his face?

"The Liverpool Echo didn't give us a good review because we didn't have screens up, which was a technical error. And Scousers hate Mancunians and the feeling's mutual. All the northern cities that aren't maudlin have enjoyed it."

Ah, the regional bias, and a Boris-esque contempt for Merseyside - sounds like a pretty lame excuse. And if he knew "Scousers hate Mancunians and the feeling's mutual", then why bother have the tour stop off in Liverpool in the first place?

"We know it's a good show."

The last, ultra-defensive refuge of the critically maligned, roughly translating as: "Anyone who's dissatisfied can go fuck themselves because we know best".

I suppose Coogan can't really be seen to admit flaws and weaknesses in the show given that it's still touring and he doesn't want to talk down the product for those who've yet to see it - but, all the same, this response is still disappointing.

courtesy of stand-up Dominic Frisby. An accurate portrayal of the life of a circuit comic. In this case, Hitler.

Back of the net (eventually)

STEVE COOGAN, 31ST OCTOBER 2008, CARDIFF MILLENNIUM CENTRE

* Warning: contains spoilers *

Hard to believe, but Steve Coogan's triumphant 'The Man Who Thinks He's It' show, my video copy of which has very nearly worn out, is ten years old. Since then, he's performed on the silver screen in '24 Hour Party People' and 'A Cock & Bull Story' amongst other films; he's created a whole new character with his own TV series, ageing roadie Tommy Saxondale; he's tried his hand at straight drama with 'Sunshine'; he's voiced a pair of characters in an animated series, Peter Baynham's 'I Am Not An Animal'; and his Baby Cow production company has been responsible for bringing some of the brightest, sharpest new comedy shows around into our living rooms - 'The Mighty Boosh', 'Gavin & Stacey' and 'Ideal', to name but three. Meanwhile Simon Pegg and Julia Davis, members of the 'The Man Who Thinks He's It' supporting cast, have gone on to become stars in their own right with 'Spaced' and 'Nighty Night' respectively.

And now here Coogan is, back on stage with a new show, the self-deprecatingly titled 'Alan Partridge And Other Less Successful Characters'. The question is: can he still cut it as a stand-up? And the answer, for the first half of the evening at least, has to be "No, not really".

The show begins, as did 'The Man Who Thinks He's It' (henceforth TMWTHI for brevity...), with Pauline Calf, singing a carefully choreographed song in praise of Marriott hotels. She has some sharp one-liners (Of a random bloke in the audience: "Cock like a bookie's pencil. You could time an egg by him"), but her 'set' disappointingly follows the same structure as in TMWTHI, concluding with her reading from her latest book, a spy thriller, and the gag about suffering concussion ("He said 'How many fingers have I got up?' and I thought 'Fuckin' 'ell, I must be paralysed too'"), while neatly delivered, is an old one.

Next is Tommy Saxondale, who turns out to be the least successful of the less successful characters, so to speak. Presumably Coogan gives him a slot to capitalise on the popularity of the series, but the decision to have him half-arsedly deliver a "Just Say No" style presentation on the dangers of drugs could have been rather better thought out, and laughs are at a premium. A large part of the problem is that Saxondale isn't really at home in the present company; he's not really played in the series as an out-and-out comedy character, but as a more true-to-life and frequently pathetic figure who's got an modicum of decency buried beneath his exterior bluster. In many ways he's a revealing reflection of his creator, anxiously drifting further away from the excesses of his youth. But, on the big stage in the glare of the spotlights, there's no room for the touching subtleties of the TV series, and he's a bit lost and hardly helped by the most lumpen of the evening's musical numbers.

Then, in his newsprint trousers looking like a member of Bros gone street, it's Duncan Thicket, who I gather is something of a Marmite character even for fellow Coogan aficionados. I loved the way Coogan used him to parody the twin cults of observational and self-deprecatory comedy in TMWTHI, as well as some of the one-liners his own character David Daft came out with, but tonight the pisstake of nostalgia comedy beloved of Peter Kaye and his mini-me Jason Manford - pregnant with possibility - is frustratingly underdeveloped. His segment is salvaged, though, when his ventriloquist's dummy starts turning the air blue before pinning him back in his chair by the throat.

The last act of the first half is Paul Calf, in many ways the best thing about TMWTHI but here treading old ground from the very outset - arriving on stage in a motorised wheelchair, when the music stops he tilts his head to one side and says in a robotic Stephen-Hawking-meets-Manc monotone "The universe is fucking massive..." His romantic dalliance with a gypsy is a lazy way of guaranteeing of cheap laughs too, though it does at least give rise to one great retort: "You're a Scouser AND a gypsy? Christ, I'm lucky I've still got my second name!"

Thankfully the second half belongs to Alan Partridge, quite literally.

It's hard to overstate how much of an Alan fan I am (though I haven't gone as far as the chest tattoo of his head just yet). I quote him on average at least once every day. Whenever I find myself in Currys I have to try out all the CD players, muttering "Nice tray action" for my own amusement. Going to Norwich feels like going on a pilgrimage. I once drank out of an aerialator (though it was red wine, not coffee - the red wine being what convinced me it would be a good idea). In my student days, my housemates and I even hosted a Partridge-themed party: Scotch eggs, ladyboys (the drink combination, that is), someone dressed in sports casual, someone else gyrating in a PVC thong, some very dodgy printed material shut in a drawer guests were given strict instructions not to open...

So coming face-to-face with Coogan's most rounded and celebrated character (and quite rightly so) is the fulfilment of a long-term ambition. A brilliant opening montage and voiceover has us bursting with anticipation, and we're not disappointed when Alan leaps onto the stage and breaks straight into a medley of songs including, most memorably, Queen's 'Radio Ga Ga'.

As with TMWTHI, Alan's here in his role as life coach, speaking from a position of authority and experience as someone who now enjoys fraternising with the likes of Monty Don at a private members' club but who only a few years earlier reached his nadir by "shitting myself in PC World". He imparts his wisdom in the form of his Forward Solutions presentation, using not a blind man's cane but an electronically modified gauntlet that he hasn't quite got to grips with, at one point inadvertently alighting upon a stash of gay S&M photos amidst the slideshow and later accidentally blowing the head off an animated JFK with a virtual shotgun.

The interviewees are almost redundant, the bulk of the interview segment taken up with a visual gag which finds Alan mistakenly signing up for penis enlargement online and, as his guests continue talking, hurriedly composing an email to cancel, his laptop screen projected above the stage for the audience's amusement. Apparently this is a device used in Patrick Marber's 'Closer' - not seen either the play or the film so I can't really comment myself, but as Marber is Alan's co-creator it seems likely this is a licenced borrow for the purposes of a knowing in-joke rather than an unlicenced steal.

The set concludes with Alan's self-penned, self-directed and self-performed play about the life of Sir Thomas More, the genius of which is largely the ease with which Coogan plays one character attempting to play another ("Your dinner, my lord - boar's head and lark's tongue." "What? I ordered the lasagne..."). Best of all, though, is the moment when Alan loses his thread and forgets his lines, floundering around in a 'Groundhog Day' style trap from which he is unable to escape until at last thrown a lifeline by one of his fellow actors.

But that's not quite the end. In the spoof behind-the-scenes footage of the TMWTHI show, Coogan hammed up the popular perception that beneath all the masks he's an unlikeable person. On this tour he goes on the mock-offensive, claiming in a spectacular finale that 'Everyone's A Bit Of A Cunt Sometimes' as the rest of cast dance around and twirl umbrellas in a superb very definitely post-watershed take on 'Mary Poppins'. I'm not alone in finding myself humming the tune long into the night.

So, a real pleasure in the end - though perhaps 'Alan Partridge And Other Much, Much Less Successful Characters' would have been an even more apt title?

Eddie Izzard, Stewart Lee, Ivor Dembina, compere Ronnie Golden - The King's Head, Crouch End, 03/10/08

There's a passage in Harry Pearson's brilliant football-themed memoir / travelogue 'The Far Corner' which details the author's running battle with his lunch while sat on a bus and which concludes with the observation that "I don't know who it was that invented egg mayonnaise sandwiches, but I suspect it was someone with a heavy investment in the dry-cleaning industry".

I now know how he feels.

Hurriedly stuffing an egg mayo sarnie into my face pre-gig, some of the aforementioned filling drops out, I presume onto the pavement. No such luck, however - as I discover to my cost when I later reach into my pocket for my ringing phone, press it to my ear and inadvertently squidge egg mayonnaise into my lughole.

This kind of thing is only supposed to happen in bad sitcoms. Tonight's entertainment will have to go some way to be funnier.

Ronnie Golden, the King's Head's regular compere, appears to be the lovechild of Derek Acora and Roy Walker (if that's possible and not too grim to contemplate). He kicks off proceedings with a number of standards with his band The Rex, before taking requests to perform one song in the style of another. James Brown's take on Leonard Cohen is obvious enough (peppered with yelps of "Yeah!", "Get on up!" and "Get down!"), but the larynx-shredding Tom Waits cover of Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' is wondrous - not least because Ronnie's somehow still able to talk afterwards.

Ivor Dembina is probably better known in London as the host of comedy nights in Brixton and Hampstead (presumably to two very different types of crowd...) than as a stand-up in his own right, but, though his short set is a fairly disjointed series of gags, he's got a far sharper mind than his appearance - woolly hat, awkward-looking - might suggest.

Foregrounding his Jewishness from the outset, he sets out to say things others probably couldn't, claiming "I'm all for giving the Occupied Territories back, as long as we can keep New York" and later pushing the boundaries of taste by playing up the Jewish indignation at being lumped in with gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled in the holocaust memorials: "'It's not Yourschwitz, it's Auschwitz'!"

From a man who looks like he might wander around London collecting dog-ends to a man who wrote a novel featuring a character who wanders around London collecting dog-ends. Regular readers of my site will no doubt realise that Stewart Lee is the reason I'm here.

Lee begins by ridiculing the oft-repeated cliche that being a stand-up must be "the hardest job in the world" - his point only partly compromised when he's forced to deal with the drunken interruptions of a bloke at pains to let everyone know his mum's just arrived.

The bulk of the set involves Lee reading from "celebrity hardbacks" and deconstructing even the most seemingly innocent sentences. While taking pot-shots at Chris Moyles's 'The Difficult Second Book' is hardly a challenging course of action for a comic of Lee's talents, he does it so well. Every time he reads out a line, repeats it, closes the book and says slowly and deliberately "Well..." or "Now...", we know that it's destined for dissection by his ruthless logic. His observation about the way Davina McCall's celebrity endorsement suggests Moyles has failed even in his lowly ambition to write a book that can be enjoyed on the shitter is brilliant. As for Asher D's comparing himself to Jesus, I think we can all see the direction in which that material might be taken, given Lee's past...

When he leaves the stage, I'm suspicious that his time's been cut short for some reason - and that reason soon becomes clear, Ronnie Golden announcing to the stunned surprise and delight of the whole room that none other than Eddie Izzard has popped along for a quick set. Such are the bonuses of going to well-established and well-respected comedy nights in the capital, it seems.

Now, at the risk of seeming ungrateful at getting the unexpected opportunity to witness a seasoned and celebrated stand-up accustomed to playing theatres and stadia performing in front of barely 75 people (a full house), I remain largely unmoved while everyone else swoons and falls about with laughter. Just because it FEELS I should do likewise doesn't mean I ACTUALLY should, and while his latest material has its moments - particularly a section about Noah's Ark and his musings about what was cutting-edge in the Stone Age - it doesn't have the same impact as what's gone before.

Part of the problem is that Izzard's predecessor on stage has in the past been critical of his simulation of spontaneity, and I've got that thought on the brain - a rare occasion indeed when one comic not only heckles another but does so a few years previously...

To his credit, Izzard has at least confessed to this deceit, having done so most recently in a televised conversation with Graham Norton a couple of days prior to tonight's show - but on that occasion he also took the opportunity to brazenly shoehorn the not particularly funny Wikipedia routine into the flow of their couch chat, so some of the material is already familiar. Why do I feel as I do about this routine and yet lap up Stewart Lee's closing gag about poisonous berries, one I've heard him use several times before?

Ultimately, it probably comes down to the simple fact that I prefer Lee and, no doubt unlike nearly everyone else here (with the exception perhaps of The Actor Kevin Eldon, lurking by the door with a bevy of female companions), would actually have rather enjoyed an extra half-hour of ritual Moyles savaging. Ungrateful git that I am.