Russell Howard

O2 Arena

That boy-next-door charm has made him something of a BBC Three pin-up, where his Good News can attract up to 1.4million viewers for a single showing… many times more if you count reruns and iPlayer. Such mainstream youth success means has the sort of audience who cheer, without irony, at mention of Take Me Out, Twilight and Justin Bieber -– so he must walk the line between taking the mick and being too cynical. That’s mainly achieved with playful turns of phrase, with analogies such as Madonna’s veiny arm being ‘like the BFG’s penis’ or his punny suggestions for strip club names.

Not that cynical is a word readily associated with Howard. The whole show comprises reasons to be cheerful, which he conveys with an unaffected, infectious glee. Nor is it as soft and toothless as his overwhelmingly positive attitude might suggest – he can talk about Thai ping-pong sex clubs just as naturally as he anthropomorphises his dog into a cutesy cartoon.

But how many other comedians could, genuinely, have something as overwhelmingly upbeat as Russell’s List Of Joy, which he reads from a laptop while perched on a leather armchair on stage, while at another point he says: ‘This show’s basically a love letter to my family.’

His relationship with his brother is certainly fruitful. He mentions he once covered the £20,000 medical cost when his sibling’s appendix burst on an uninsured holiday – but the material that relationship has provided has surely repaid that debt many times over. As he regales us with tales of practical jokes and of no-holds-barred teasing over the Christmas dinner table, it is an obvious celebration of a close-knit family.

His full-on mate Spider, a friend since school where he demonstrated a prodigious gift for masturbation, similarly provides more than his fair share of anecdotes – again with his vigour for life lionised and mocked in equal portion.

Howard is animated on the O2 vast stage, though he does over-use a few tricks, such as comparing certain behaviour as to what ‘mental’ people would do, or by apparently slipping up over words and spinning off into a side routine. The technique of illustrating stories with a suitably comic picture has also been appropriated from Good News, and never more so that the tabloid story of ‘the Ninja From Norwich’ who is predictably incompetent, even though you’ve got to love him for trying.

The show ends with a Q&A, which is as messy as these things usually are, with Howard trying, unsuccessfully, to pick out possible seeds for humour from an arena full of people baying for him to show them his arse.

That he’s playing such spaces is an inescapable fact for a photogenic boy-next-door performing what could easily be pigeonholed as ‘safe’ material. Today’s comedy industry is always going to manufacture stars in this mould – but away from his natural, self-effacing charm, Howard has material that’s often sharper and much better-written than you might expect. Success couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.