More than 15 years after he first appeared on The Peter Serafinowicz Show, there’s tremendous irony in inept, overweight ‘business man’ Brian Butterfield making his live debut. The bumbling, bearish character, beholden to antiquated technology, is only able to appear on stage in the jowly flesh because of impressive prosthetics and the AI-enabled imagery that facilitates his incoherent entrepreneurial seminar.

As an exercise in submersing oneself in character, the Placeholder Name Tour is an unalloyed triumph, with Serafinowicz never once revealing himself beneath his creation; even when ad-libbing or scrambling around genuine microphone difficulties, right up until the Notorious BIG finale that feels like a release from the accumulated cringe of his persistent foolishness and somewhat touching, belated realisation of his failings. Bookended by the insane diets and karaoke schemes of his infamous promotions of yore, there’s also a well-judged balance between the lore of his classic sketches, which have clarified and burnished the character over time and repeated play on YouTube, and a knowing understanding of precisely what Butterfield would be plugging in 2023.

He shares his worthless business qualification with the audience, presented via a typically illogical PowerPoint presentation, dealing in cryptocurrency and Dragon’s Den-style bluster. But his true grand project is, naturally, the egotistical folly of all modern moguls, a space rocket launch, the impending catastrophe gifting the show a much-anticipated ending.

Although it’s rarely less than a pleasure to spend time in the bewildered Butterfield’s company, and one hesitates to describe a show performed in a fat suit as excessively broad and flabby in parts, the audience interaction segments really labour and never catch fire. Butterfield has always worked best when his misplaced confidence was supplemented by snappy editing. And he’s at his best here in interplay with his useless, Alexa-style virtual assistant and the pre-mediated gags of his ill-conceived, hopeless presentation.

Brian Butterfield: Placeholder Name Tour runs until Wednesday 4 October, with an extra date at Eventim Apollo, London, 14 June; reviewed at Glee Club, Glasgow.