Channel-zapping to great effect

Ross Noble is like a channel-zapper with a mind of its own. The amiable 24-year-old Geordie bounces gleefully from idea to idea, reacting to the crowd and to his own ad libs then following his train of thought to the end of the line. And beyond.

So we go from elephants balancing on a monkey to Coronation Street's Adam Rickett to a musical about rickets, accompanied by full bad-taste limp. A chatty PR man in the front row inspires a gallon of good ideas that culminate in a breathtaking flight of fancy when Noble pulls together his motifs - rickets, trap doors, elephants on monkeys, Bacardi, Afghan news donkeys (you had to be there) - to describe an imagined launch party to end all launch parties. PR culture nailed in one glorious, thoroughly unmalicious moment.

So what marks out Ross Noble from the swelling ranks of the aimlessly surreal? Well, gargantuan comic talent and innate good taste help. Like all the great improvisers, he listens: to the audience and to his instincts. 'Have I gone too far?' he asks us at one point, knowing full well that he has - and that it doesn't matter.

'I feel like I've turned up to a funeral wearing a sombrero.' Which prompts a fabulous ten-minute routine on sombreros and funerals. Not everything works - a Shirley Bassey sequence tanked it but Noble bloody-mindedly stuck with it anyway. When joy is unconfined, there'll always be a few messy moments.