The snow is coming down hard outside, but Ellie Taylor isn’t going anywhere.

Having been forced to cancel her headline slot at the ill-fated inaugural Chipping Norton Comedy Festival because of snow, a couple of weeks earlier, she is sticking out her date at the North Wall. And she clearly loves the intimate north Oxford venue – part of St Edward’s School.

“This is where they have their school plays!” she says, those trademark big eyes widening to saucers. “Did anyone else here go to a comprehensive like me, where the stage was next to a badminton net?”

And it’s not just the school that has impressed her; so has the neighbourhood.

“Summertown – it’s one of those places that sounds too perfect,” she smiles, and jokes about Hot Fuzz.

She engages easily with her adoring audience, some of whom have come a long way to see her – some as far as Devon, it transpires. But it was likeable 50-something audience member Paul who received most of her attention, laying himself open to a comprehensive if good-natured, ribbing by coming in after the show had started and sitting right at the front. He took it well.

Paul, a part-time health and safety officer at a local quarry, found himself repeatedly in the spotlight and took it all in good humour.

Ellie’s material focuses on her life as a female comedian, but also as a married woman with no children. She regales us with stories of the Whatsapp group set up by friends in the same position – ‘The Barren Karens’ – and her sense of betrayal/ envy when one of their number leaves to have a baby – leaving just two “Two is not a group!” she wails.

She tells us about her marriage to a CNN reporter, repeatedly posted to war zones – but feigns frustration that nothing dramatic happens to him, which, of course, would earn her sympathy, media coverage and new material.

She comes across as honest and self-effacing, making light of her appearance on Live at the Apollo (“did they make you wear that?” she has one acquaintance asking afterwards), and confesses to ranking her carrier bags by status – forbidding her husband to take his packed lunch to work in a Harvey Nichols bag because that’s for giving presents to the in-laws, but stopping short of allowing him to use an Asda bag (“For vegetable peelings only. We’re not trash!”).

She continues to mock herself over her product endorsement sideline, advertising a lavatory air freshener – a bottle of which she produces in that Harvey Nichols bag. When she showed one to the audience in Didcot, it was stolen. Summertown is better than that, she suggests. “It’s middle class central!”

With an easy wit and natural innocence, it’s impossible not to love Ellie Taylor. More than worth the journey in the snow – even from Devon.

TIM HUGHES

4.5/5