If you weren’t keeping your eye on the ball on Friday (or rather, keeping your eye on twitter), you might have missed the announcement about Russell Brand playing a one off stand up gig in Brighton on Sunday. Enough people obviously were paying attention because the Theatre Royal was packed out with a loyal audience of fans, including Norman Cook and Eddie Kidd.

For an hour and a half the crowd Russell did his best to appal and impress in equal measure, veering between tales of lurid fantasies of wanting to sleep with everyone on the planet (including Grotbags from Emu), then back to eloquent, almost-classical eulogies on the human condition. He gave us his personal take on some of his recent public activities – his appearance on Newsnight with Peter Hitchens, his TV program on drugs and abstinence, and the Olympics closing ceremony – all in an articulate and funny manner, although he didn’t mention Katy Perry until he took questions from the audience at the end.

The show was closed in typically anarchic style, playing the audience the messages on his mobile answer phone, skipping over a call from his mum and some rather threatening messages to one from Noel Gallagher berating him murdering the Beatles version of ‘I Am The Walrus’. Russell responded in typical anarchic fashion returning the call live on stage, leaving a feisty critique of Oasis’ career on his answerphone, along with some huge cheers from the audience.

He bounds off stage clearly not caring if this gets him into the same trouble as his last answerphone message.