SOMETHING akin to what might have transpired if Woody Allen was raised by a family of British vicars (and the latter is actually true in this case), Robin Ince’s downbeat, machine gun fire delivery compacts literally life, the universe and everything into just over an hour. It is very hard to get him off stage once he’s started, as he’s desperate to cram so much in.

“I always imagined I’d grow up to be somebody cool, like Hunter S Thompson. Now I realise I’ve become a kind of grown up Charlie Brown,” he sighed. He wishes he’d spent his time at uni reading science and not English. Not many comics like to reference Richard Dawkins as much as Ince manages without even trying, or bring on stage books he’s found that amuse him just to read bits out loud. It’s an indescribable mish-mash, but it somehow works, probably surprising Ince most of all.

He’s a typical middle class leftie (reading the Indy and not the Grauniad – “better graphs”; buying Richard Littlejohn books in Oxfam because a disgruntled reader had written a speech bubble on the author’s picture on the cover reading “I am a tw*t”; and the obligitory blood-boiling hatred of Melanie Phillips), so he has a ready-made contingent of fans who just enjoy revelling in a good old hate-filled lampooning of reactionary Daily Mail columnists. But he isn’t just playing to the gallery. If he wasn’t doing this for a living, it’s likely he’d be burbling the same kind of thing to himself on a train while other passengers tried to avoid eye contact.

He has come to Liverpool twice in the last few months and he proved himself just as formidable the second time round, playing to a more appreciative audience downstairs at the Royal Court.

He’s clever, he’s quick, and he hasn’t got time to pick on an audience as he’s got too much ranting to do, so he’s not everyone’s cup of tea it must be said. But nobody makes me laugh like Robin Ince. I’m a relatively recent convert to his stream-of-consiousness maniacal stand up (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know whether that was my inner monologue or outer monologue talking there” is a typical apology for his train of thought), but already he’s top of the comedy tree to me.

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