In a packed house this endearing star will find you a seat

THERE are some comedians whose sheer likeability makes you warm to them from the start – and Mark Watson is one of them. The comic and novelist from Bristol, pictured, is everybody’s favourite English Welshman – his family hail from South Wales and he used to perform in a faux-Welsh accent. Today he exudes a down-home, self-effacing, blokeish charm.

Rather than fret backstage while waiting for the sell-out crowd to be seated, he mingles and chats with the audience, while pointing out spare seats.

The leap-off point for I’m Not Here is anxiety-laden trip he undertook to Australia some 15 months

ago. Having been allowed to board the plane, despite his passport being ripped, he had to endure the existential angst of needing to prove his identity upon landing or face being sent home.

Once Watson is up and running, he slides effortlessly through the gears, safe in the knowledge that if there’s a lull in proceedings, he’s already warned us he might introduce a fake encore to get the ball rolling again.

This he duly does, even persuading a member of the audience to give him a piggyback on-stage again. As the laughs come thick and fast, Watson veers off on all sorts of tangents: his drinking (the premise of his last touring show, Flawless), his lack of a signature comedy routine, marriage, inability to grasp the phonetic alphabet, trying to explain the pre-digital world to his son...

All is done with engaging warmth as he vents his anxieties – not with rancour but rather bemused and frustrated by the perils of the modern world and his place in it.

Until August 29