Wizard Izzard on stage

He's never starred in his own TV comedy show. It's four years since he last toured. And yet Eddie Izzard has proved himself to be our foremost stand-up superstar, breaking box office records with four nights at Wembley Arena. That's 50,000-odd tickets, sold in a trice by a transvestite improviser from Bexhill-On-Sea.

The even odder thing is, his material isn't all that fantastic. He admits it himself on the DVD commentary for the Sexie concert video. 'I wonder how you get fantastic material?' he muses, as his onstage self waffles on about airline food, Greek myths, Time Team and inventing fire.

But Izzard's addictive properties lie in his ability to risk all on a whim. Some gags are pre-cooked. Mostly, though, he wings it: takes one stupid idea and lets us see him stretch it out into a universe of complementary absurdity.

Sometimes he fails. 'Should be funnier,' he mutters during the Eastbourne performance caught on the Sexie DVD. The first show of this UK tour, it's dreary stuff, the pressures of a hometown gig (give or take a couple of miles) flattening Izzard's imaginings.

But these, a month later, are the biggest gigs of his career. How will one pert-breasted man conquer 14,000 punters at a go with nothing to fall back on but lipgloss and charm? Well, the daring is the draw. This is the stand-up equivalent of trying to climb K2 on rollerskates. It shouldn't work. But don't you want to see him try?