JUST before showtime Bill Bailey tweeted from his dressing room: ‘Got my regular backstage rider: some Organic Lightly Salted Wholegrain Low Fat Rice Cakes, and two 13 amp plug sockets. Let’s rock!’

And rock he did, in a big way. At the end they had to virtually drag him off stage as he was playing Angus Young’s guitar solo to AC/DC’s Highway To Hell, tongue out, of course.

That was just after his death metal doorstep encounter with Jehovah’s Witnesses, his complex handbell rendering of Stairway To Heaven and the heavy rock singalong version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman played on a guitar made from a Bible and with much emphasis on the line ‘To save us all from Satan’s pow’r’. Horns aloft, naturally.

As ever with Bill, his musical virtuosity is very much to the fore – guitar, keyboards, mandola and even hand pan (it looks like a kettle barbecue) play a major role as he switches effortlessly between instruments.

He was very physical too, either bouncing around the stage to a disco version of Theresa May’s speeches, imitating the red bird of paradise’s mating dance or demonstrating actor Jason Statham’s sideways walk.

Bailey is a genius, despite his expression of permanent bewilderment, and offers so much more than your average stadium-filling comic. The amount of work he gets through of an evening would turn even Michael Macintyre thin – and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

And, given that we were witnessing the 78th show (of 95, to be followed by a month in London at Christmas) on his Larks In Transit tour, it was amazing it all sounded fresh as a daisy.

His targets included the ‘busking Furby’ Ed Sheeran, politician Michael Gove, for whom automatic doors don’t open because they don’t recognise him as a human being and, bizarrely, Randy Vanwarmer whose major key songs are like ‘praline injected into your soul’.

Anyone who can describe Brexit as sailing into uncertain waters on a ‘semi-inflated lilo of self-determination’ and social media as ‘houmous dipped into with a stale pitta bread of self-loathing’ has got my vote.

The Poundshop Gandalf (his words) engaged in absurd audience banter, describing us as the strangest bunch he’d encountered (except Yeovil) with a running gag about saying sorry.

Bill also treated us to You Are My Sunshine in German, Tom Waits’s version of Old MacDonald and his bird calls quiz (including sampling the loon into trance music – trust me, it works).

And if he had done nothing else, he would have been worth seeing just for the moment when he combed his hair across his bald pate in a passable impression of the ‘angry apricot’ that is Donald Trump.

Mad and brilliant.