Al Murray shows are a curious thing to approach, purely because his audience are not really your usual comedy fans. In fact, they’re generally an audience of real-life Al Murrays, which can make for a surreal evening – us laughing at him laughing at them laughing at him not realising he’s laughing at them laughing at him laughing at the French… Or something like that…

Saturday’s show was a benefit for Camkids, a charity for Cambodian orphans, so it featured guest spots from three acts invited by our host – our own Brendan Riley, Germany’s Henning Wehn, and character comic Ivan Brackenbury (more later).

Murray’s Pub Landlord takes to the stage with a grating bravado, all “you faaaaacking caaaant” and the usual catchphrases, which have the audience in stitches from the off. Initially, it seems quite a pointlessly nasty sort of humour. As time ticks on and the crowd becomes more obnoxious, the comic comes into his own. Sadly, and even bizarrely, the quicker Murray’s mind works, the more it goes over the head of the crowd (example: “What do you do? You’re a postman? So whose seats are you really in?”)

Brendan Riley talked a good game with a lively set culminating in a stag do gone wrong that can’t really be faulted. But the Pub Landlord’s next personal choice – a German stand-up – as you can imagine, went down like a lead Hindenberg. This really was a tragedy as Henning Wehn is absolutely hilarious. He is another curious act to approach, which again made the evening take a stranger turn, at least from how I saw it. A German comic, taking the mick out of the British stereotype of the Germans by acting as a stereotypical German despite being fully aware of the British stereotype, booed offstage by the stereotypical “two World Wars and one World Cup” brigade? … Or something like that….

So poor old Henning quit while he was ahead, or even still alive. A crying shame, because his act was some of the most pant-wettingly funny, clever and thought-provoking comedy I’ve seen in some time. Admittedly he did get the crowd to clap along to a German sing-along before revealing it was an old Hitler youth ditty, so no wonder all the Murray-alikes got upset.

I really began to wonder if I had found myself in a parallel universe by the time Ivan Brackenbury came on. The “bonkers” hospital DJ character was just naff, but he went down almost as well as the headliner. Doing a request for a jaundice patient and playing “Yellow” by Coldplay? A bulimic gets “Bring it Back”, etc. GEDDIT? And the last guy died on his arse? I despair.

I can only give full props to the considerable talents of Al Murray (“this is an act, mate,” he yelled at some heckling idiot who identified with his stage persona a little too readily, “and that’s your facking life!”), but it was one of the weirdest nights of comedy you could probably ever see.

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