Enchanting was perhaps the best description of Ross Noble last night.

This was not only because of his apparently random, meandering stories, which seemed to end exactly where they started but kept the audience spellbound.

It was also that the raven-haired Geordie, when set against his backdrop of giant plastic multicoloured triffids, bore a striking resemblance to "every single character from the Lord Of The Rings", as he himself admitted.

Noble's act was set in his own fantastical realm, deriding rappers for "keeping it real", calling for more elfin carriages and curly shoes in modern pop music, in his own, more imaginative, "unrealtime".

Making great use of his audience, he was overjoyed to find a Sugar Puffs food tester in his front row, asking whether part of his job is to distract the Honey Monster while the other tasters steal the sugar puffs from his lair.

Later, inspired by the city, he brought the Minster to life into a giant Minster creature, before rewriting the Jorvik Centre script to include Chris and his monkey, the most famous of all the Vikings.

Then it was fast and furious, from Blair and Campbell's sexed-up dossier - "they couldn't sex up a chip shop", to GM pigs crossed with unicorns.

Few comedians could even handle, let alone improvise such a raft of material, all delivered with genius and delight.

Completely surreal but entirely human, and a strange combination of the loveable and scary, there is only one way to describe the rapidly rising young star. Magic.

Updated: 13:12 Monday, November 24, 2003