I KNOW comedy is the new rock’n’roll, but does it have to be so loud? The volume was too high for the incidental music, the enjoyable support act from Simon Evans and the annoying cinema-style adverts in the interval – where did they come from?

As for the main man himself, some of his more heated outbursts fair rattled the eardrums.

Fortunately, just about everything else in this evening was spot on. Lee Mack’s cheeky stage persona is a fuller, ruder, edgier version of his character in the BBC1 comedy Not Going Out (co-written, incidentally, with support man Evans). His act consists, as he observed in an aside, of “falling over and swearing”.

And, yes, it did, but there was also a lot of potentially dangerous interplay with the audience, in which Mack took on all-comers and mostly won, although one or two hecklers left him mildly stumped.

Mack gets away with a lot because of his charm: he is loveable even when being rude, likeable even when he is insulting the audience who return his mischief with gleeful guffaws.

It is a neat trick to pull off, letting him appear both as an old-fashioned comedian with a pocketful of closely razored gags and tall tales, put-downs and pratfalls, and modern in his use of language and in the way he observes his own act taking place.

All very amusing, but do turn it down a bit.