The musical content is largely there to give a different medium for the puns (eg, a song entitled “She’s Leaving on the QE2″ is just a foghorn tone), but there are inevitably filler ditties that are barely worthy of a Phoebe Buffay set at Central Perk.My heart habitually sinks when I see a musical instrument on stage at a comedy gig, and only rarely are the two successfully married. Of course, with Vine, even the fillers are fast, and so unwelcome intrusions are brief and forgotten quickly, although the messy ending could do with a rapid- fire execution.It’s all good clean fun, and in fact the show’s time slot seems a little incongruous – this is more 3.30pm than 9.30pm entertainment In terms of consistency, he is hard to beat. Tonight, the rat-a-tat-tat of his machine-gun is accompanied by a continuous wave of laughter. Tour continues to 22 May ( ).

“Ad- libbing is not one of my strengths,” Vine – who is the brother of the broadcaster Jeremy – admits to the audience. Indeed, if you crossed his material with the body of his colleague on The Sketch Show, Jim Tavar?you would get a Tommy Cooper tribute act.As with Cooper, Vine’s gags are timeless in that they are puns on everyday situations, as well as being inoffensive and uncontroversial But with Vine, the gags have go-faster stripes. “You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said, ‘Parking Fine’.

So that was nice.” Even better if he can get two bites at the cherry: “So I went down my local ice-cream shop, and said, ‘I want to buy an ice cream’. You could also save money by using the same supplier for both your gas and electricity and paying monthly by direct debit.. Investors who feel they pay far too much in fund management charges, particularly when stock market returns are disappointing, may be interested to learn that performance-related fees are to become more common. We’ve been trying that for 40 years, and it’s clearly not working very well. People were open-minded.”"But then,” he says, sipping hard on his coffee, “drugs policy drifted off and crime and punishment became an obsession, at the expense of harm reduction.