MILTON Jones is the “weird bloke with the shirts from Mock The Week”.

Plenty of you know that already, judging by the healthy-sized audience on Monday, barely two months after the Lion Whisperer first performed his deadpan act at the Grand Opera House.

Shirt first: it was so loud that even the supercats wouldn’t be seen in it on the jungle catwalk, but nothing else about Mr Jones was noisy.

Such stillness, such Swiss-perfect timing, punctured by more pauses for effect than Clint in drawling cowboy mode, that he never wasted a word as he pared each epigram to the bone.

The same principle applied to his opening act, Milton’s outwardly bumbling grandfather (in reality a stiff-limbed Milton supporting himself on a shopping trolley that contained assorted surprising visual gags, such as a hard pizza better known as a darts board).

Milton may be bracketed with Stuart Francis and Tim Vine in the league of one-liners but he stands alone in his skill at changing the potentially metronomic rhythm of his show by his use of “props”.

First he held a series of slides in the air, impossible to see but with a daft punchline to each one, and later he lent on his knees by an overhead projector to flick through images accompanied by asides, leaving just enough time for you to think of your own gag before he trumped it each time.

The world is a better place for Milton Jones’s absurdist world view and old-fashioned, clean fun.