Dara O'Briain's distinctive humour thrives on spontaneity and audience interaction.

A responsive capacity crowd gave him opportunities aplenty to display his off-beat imagination and good-natured sense of the ridiculous.

His persuasive Irish delivery is so fast and comic invention so unpredictable that keeping up with his mercurial train of thought is quite exhausting.

The professions of sundry members of the front row got him started, notably the head-hunter and the teacher who disciplined his charges with the "cloud monster" fashioned from blackboard dusters.

Gillette's Fusion Power and Stealth, Teflon's Stealth Kettle and the War on Bacteria all came in for well-deserved mockery. What indeed happens when you pour Dettol into Yakult? The mind boggles.

The prospect of professors of dentistry arguing passionately against people choosing to pull out their own teeth put the mockers on the smug notion of "balance" so cherished by news programmes.

Homeopathy and wellness ("a relaxing chat and a bit of a rub"), hectoring nutritionists, the horrors of gyms, the "turn-down team" in hotels, celebrity culture, unfast-forwardable DVDs, neighbourhood watch ("is it just a sticker?") – a wealth of observational material of his own and suggested by members of the audience, individually acknowledged after his own ovation, was mined deep.

He had apparently toyed with the idea of calling this tour You Had To Be There. Too right.