ED Byrne wanders on in trainers and jeans to warm up for the warm-up act, one Matt Kirshen.

Ed has cherry-picked him off the London circuit. "He's really good but I reckon I can take him," says the Irishman.

Judging by what follows, Ed's competitive streak does not set the bar very high. Kirshen has the face of a child and a childish humour to match, with aspirations to intelligence but pedantic material as stale as ash and a metronomic delivery lacking a change of pace. "I can't believe I'm playing the effing Opera House," he keeps saying. Nor, alas, could I.

Oh no, the deadening man-boy returns post-interval to waffle on again before introducing an hour of hyper-ranting by an affable Irishman best known for his irritatingly perky Carphone Warehouse adverts.

Yer man in baggy suit and pumps has built his Edinburgh Fringe hit vaguely around Falling Down, that film where Michael Douglas loses it big style in traffic jams, shops and burger joints. Where Douglas favoured guns and baseball bats, Byrne places his faith in words. Constantly readjusting his hair, he rambles on as he posits himself as the ordinary man at war with the everyday world.

Trouble is, Byrne doesn't lift the everyday out of the ordinary, particularly in his prosaic dissection of pop culture. Aside from his thoughts on the vicissitudes of relationships, his material falls down rather than stands up.