Richard Herring thinks Steve Martin is more evil than Maxine Carr, that

foreigners should be deported, and he wants to stab women. No, of course he doesn't, those are the horrible conclusions of the twisted logic and deep love of pedantry that power his show. He's a lovely, liberal and slightly tortured man, playing a part. He takes propositions, such as the idea that people who vote BNP are too stupid to vote, and runs with them in lightening circles until he has nowhere else to go. The results are often extremely funny, occasionally painful. "I have to live with this brain, you only have to sit there and look mildly amused," he says toward the end of the set, an

indication of how passionately he cares about trying to get funny *right*. Ever since he and Stewart Lee created two of the great comic characters of the past 20 years - Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan and Alan Partridge - Herring's stock-in-trade has been good-humoured invective, about people and things that are just ill-considered or plain wrong, masked as righteous indignation.

This show continues this by wondering, for example: if apple-naming could have started the Hundred Years' War; what the best way to deal with global warming might be; and how to avoid being called gullible - all aided by

trousers containing both a greengrocer's and a library. While none of the routines build to anything as funny as his 2001 show *Christ on a Bike's* "Nobody's called Boaz!" gag, with its double litany of Jesus's non-ancestors, he uses the same incredible memory to perform a challenging, complex act. It's not quite fully stand-up, as it's a heavily scripted show with little audience interaction, yet it tests the boundaries well and, with practice, it's bound to become funnier.