5pm Update – Following publication of this piece Jason Byrne tweeted to explain that "Lee Evans begged me to close, he said he couldn't follow the byrne magic"...

Went to see the C4 Comedy Gala at the O2 Arena last night. Part of me was enjoying the epic line-up, but part of me was thinking to myself how does one work out the running order and please everyone. Surely you can only have one headline act, and most of the line-up, Lee Evans and Michael McIntyre in particular, but also Russell Brand, Alan Carr and various others, were major Arena headliners in their own right.

This reminded me of an old TV story about how veteran producer Lew Grade managed to get both Roger Moore and Tony Curtis to star in the ancient crime fighting yarn The Persuaders. The veteran dealmaker spoke to them separately and promised both of them top billing. He then had to work out a way of sticking to his word. He did it with the now-famous split screen credits so that they both featured exactly equally.

At past O2 Galas a slightly similar technique has been employed. The show has effectively been split down the middle into two shows divided by an interval. The last time I went Michael McIntyre closed the first half and Lee Evans closed the second and everyone went home happy.

I'm not sure what happened last night, but while Michael McIntyre finished the first half Lee Evans was not the final act. Maybe he needed to get the last bus back to Essex, maybe he was nervous about headlining because this was the first big gig he had done here in a while – he has only just announced his 2014 megatour, entitled Monster. I don't know the answer, but it felt like an odd decision.

Not that it is the first time I've seen this happen. I've seen Jason Manford go on early at the Comedy Store so that he still had time to get home to Manchester and I've seen Ricky Gervais open a benefit so that he could have the rest of the evening to put his feet up. But opening gives the crowd's chuckle muscles a chance to regroup and start laughing again. Evans, instead, went on during the build-up to the end.

This made it harder for the acts that followed. Evans is such a fireball of energy it takes a while for the audience to recover and for the show to pick up momentum again. Jason Byrne was great but, maybe it was just me, I was waiting for a big surprise finale when  Jack Dee, who had already done his short set earlier, came on, thanked everyone, the lights came on and we were all sent home. It was a great show, but it could have ended on a bigger high than this. I don't know what was going on when the running order was worked out, but when you've got an unfollowable main attraction like Lee Evans the only place for him to appear is at the top of the bill.