Silver-spoon privilege spun into comedy gold

‘I’m going to tell you now, a lot of my material isn’t very relatable,” Tom Houghton cheerily announces early on in a laugh-a-minute solo debut so delightful it might just propel him to the big-time overnight. That aside is the understatement of the Fringe.

Houghton, the son of Sir Nicholas Houghton, former Chief of the Defence Staff of the Armed Forces (“the head of the entire military,” Houghton fils explains), doesn’t merely have a silver spoon dangling from his mouth, he lives within walking distance of the Crown Jewels. His father is now Constable of the Tower of London, and Houghton Jr’s bedroom, in Queen’s House, is next to where Guy Fawkes was interrogated and above the crypt where Thomas More was beheaded. Getting to his bachelor pad entails negotiating two battle-gates, a moat and excited tourists determined to mistake him for Prince Harry.

Judging by the anecdotes with which he regales his audience at the Gilded Balloon – a room barely bigger than an armoured personnel carrier – this relatively new kid on the block has enough material to furnish an entertaining autobiography. Want to know what it was like being in the Royal Box during the Queen’s birthday parade? Here’s the inside scoop.

What could come across as snooty showing-off, with military-background starchiness, is rendered, actually, entirely relatable by virtue of his combination of good-blokeish charm and out of kilter campness. He has Jack Whitehall’s winning innocent-abroad quality as he relives being trained for kidnap growing up in Belfast during the Troubles (“I thought it was hilarious”) and the downsides of going to an all-male boarding-school.

Throw in smartly polished stories of hopeless attempts to impress the ladies, two accidental liaisons with transsexuals and an elaborately cringe-making send-off while stationed in Germany, which saw him running amok in a Chinese restaurant dressed as a duck, and you perhaps have the long-awaited male answer to Bridget Jones. Enough to make his high-flying father proud? Who knows but, in my book, this unexpected tour de force warrants a 21-gun salute.

Until Aug 28. Tickets: 0131 622 6552; edfringe.com