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How many years should you have to wait for someone to fulfil their potential? I’ve been recommending Alfie Brown as a name to watch for so long it is starting to get embarrassing. 

Maybe this year I caught him on an off-night (read some thoughts about the incident that derailed his gig here) but Brown’s latest show, - Isms, starts off brilliantly before tailing off disappointingly. As ever he has a new thing to talk about. This time it is bringing up the baby he had with fellow comic Jessica Cave after a one-night stand. 

Fatherhood has mellowed Brown, as the pictures of him in possibly ironic colourful shirts suggest, but it probably hasn’t mellowed him that much. There are still exciting moments when he has the ability to send a shiver down your spine, whether it is discussing Katie Hopkins (low-hanging fruit brilliantly picked at) or what he got up to while his girlfriend was in labour. 

One of the pleasures of Brown is that he does not have a fully functioning edit button. Unfortunately on the night I saw him it kicked in when he was distracted by a sniffing woman in the audience and he felt compelled to berate her for making noises (while also complimenting her on her sexy boots). This prompted a bossy, elderly woman to pitch in and virtually order him to leave the sniffer alone and tell more jokes.

He cracked a corny dick gag and then picked up the threads of his set, but it was never quite the same as he moved on from the personal to the political and attempted to dissect the messy state of global politics and the problems of factionalism. His thoughts were, however, never less than intriguing, provocative or both. One modest proposal was that there was no point ordinary people discussing political problems as discussion was never going to solve them. It did not make a lot of a sense but at least the way he told it was very funny.

Brown is always articulate and can lob in accents and get easy laughs at will and it all looked promising, but some of the fun had been sucked out of the room by the interruption. The ending, in which he suggested a couple of footballers might as well be political experts given the shower that currently does the job, was something you might get on The Now Show and Brown is better than that. Maybe he is on sharper form on other nights, but on this occasion it felt like he scored an own goal by getting sidetracked.

Until Aug 31. Tickets here.