OOPS. IOU one Ed Byrne review. Time flies when you're having fun - or working the kind of hours that would have a Frenchman rioting.

Although when it comes down to it, I've probably been putting this review off because there's not too much you can say when it comes to Mr Byrne. Top notch, ever-reliable, worth-the-cover-price, plenty of laughs, good old Ed Byrne.

He returned to the Royal Court - a nice stage for the man, it should be said - on October 26, so a little synopsis is overdue. The show is called Different Class and Byrne is at his most enjoyable talking about the Ireland of his youth, where he explains he fitted in neither with the middle nor the working class kids around him (he didn't have a horse, he explains, unlike the pony set, or indeed the pikeys, which brought to mind the run-down Dublin of the Commitments). He's an 1980s kid, so jokes about Soda Stream and the like hit the mark nicely with the crowd of contemporaries.

Byrne remains one of the best storytellers out there, with throwaway lines that would form the high points of any other comedian's set ("You know what I call a group of goths? A mood. And do you know what I call a group of emos? An isobar. Because they're linked by a depression"). For the sheer likeability and laugh count he can't be beaten. It is impossible not to like him.

So perhaps it's my personal disinterest in weddings that made the last 20 minutes of his set, given over as they were to all things nuptual, seem a bit smug and workaday to me.

That's life I suppose, but by the time he's become a father things might have become so depressingly middle of the road I'll just be sat in the middle of the Royal Court silently weeping for the old days.

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