On Monday night, Russell Kane came to Oxford Playhouse on the 5th leg of his sell-out-everywhere-apart-from-Oxford tour; Right Man, Wrong Age. After years of wearing eye make-up and ridiculously tight trousers, he seemed to have realised how he looked and changed his tact, resulting in the audience seeing him in a whole new light.

The show began with Russell coming straight on stage, without a support act, a pleasant surprise especially with some superb “pre-set banter”. This mainly involved making fun of Oxford’s two stereotypes (Latin professors at one end of the scale and chavs at the other) and noting how unenthusiastic British audiences were compared to the Americans who were often so happy they made him angry. He was constantly moving about the stage with boundless energy and his anecdotes were often accompanied with hilarious actions and faces that really brought them to life.

He then proceeded for the first half of the show; an observational section about getting older and the ‘mirror moment’ that everyone experiences at some stage in their life, when you look at yourself and think "what am I?”. As expected he also made several references to how he wasn’t actually Nick Grimshaw which were very funny.

The second half of the show consisted of a set of much more personal stories - his newborn baby girl, he expectations of pregnancy and what to do when you don’t feel the “waves of love” at the first ultrasound scan. His parents, wife and in-laws were also the sources of many hilarious stories. However the night was rounded off with a cracker involving him being topless in the maternity ward, fake tan, his minutes-old baby’s head, in an anecdote that resembled crossing Joey Essex with Casualty.

Overall it was a great evening of comedy yet despite his best efforts, the Monday night Oxford crowd was a poor one, despite overrunning by about half an hour due to him going off-piste and talking about things that weren’t in the set.

However, if you missed him this time around, he is playing the Chipping Norton Theatre on July 10. Get tickets before they sell out!

5/5 Xav Sinden and Ali Henderson