‘Tell a fucking joke, mate.’ Michael Welch has literally just stepped onstage when he’s accosted by a large drunk man on the front row in an intimate venue. He’s impressively unfazed by this confrontation and later on he gently flatters the egos of other audience members as they decide to chip in with unsolicited non sequiturs; impressively, his diplomacy just about keeps a lid on them.

From the off, Welch gets stuck into some pretty testy material. While Michael Jackson and Princess Diana might seem like old hat, he’s always armed with a contemporary twist. And, like an upbeat Mark Nelson, he’s unafraid of pushing his jokes further than many of his contemporaries would dare. He spends some time examining The Sun newspaper, focusing on its most egregiously sexist content, such as Page 3, the News In Briefs panel, and its frankly unbelievable ‘countdown clock’ that kept track of the 16th birthdays of Emma Watson and Charlotte Church.

Otherwise, this is a jumble of ideas with segues popping off in all directions. Welch concludes with a sweet engagement story which he tells with such warmth that it feels anathema to much of the preceding material. Nevertheless, I Shouldn’t Have Said That is a consistently good hour with a smattering of darkness. 

Michael Welch: I Shouldn’t Have Said That, The Stand 5, until 25 August, 9.40pm.