Sean Lock, touring

Sean Lock, as well as being an acclaimed stand-up for many years, has also written for other comics, including Bill Bailey, Lee Evans and Mark Lamarr, and his profile has risen hugely through his stints as team captain on 8 Out of 10 Cats on Channel 4 and regular guest appearances on other panel shows, including QI and Mock the Week. His fans, including me, recall with fondness his sitcom 15 Storeys High, which ran for two series on BBC TV (and which was developed from the equally funny Radio 4 show Sean Lock’s 15 Minutes of Misery).

So it’s nice to see him back on tour with Lockipedia, which I saw at Blackheath Halls in south London. To call Lock's material observational would woefully undersell it; his absurdist/blokeist comedy, though gently crowd-pleasing and delivered in a laidback manner, can veer into much darker territory. And when his humour is a little too blokey for comfort, we realise he’s the butt of the joke; he admits to not being fussed about suitable female role models until he became the father of three daughters himself, and then goes on to do very clever extended riffs about Madonna and Jordan, which is absolutely not the misogyny parading as social observation that most comics dish out.

There are some delightful everyday references, but Lock takes the ordinary and gives it a surreal spin, such as his take on golf on the radio, the deficiencies of his 1970s childhood diet - “Salad cream is just white ketchup, isn’t it?” - and tutting at squirrels in the park. He can also dish it out, though, and among his targets for much harder-hitting but no less funny material are the BNP, Twitter fans and those who claim to have a wheat intolerance - the last of which spawns a genius take on the Paralympics.

Lock’s big idea for this tour is the inspired “audience Battleships”, where he calls out a seat number and asks its occupant to say a letter and a subject, and consults his jokes list for a gag about it - Wikipedia/Lockipedia, you see. Now if you’re going to do this, you must either have reams of material to call upon (and Lock has notes to consult at this point) or you deliberately have nothing and make the faux flummoxing and floundering work as a piece of theatre. So comics such as Jimmy Carr, who writes more new jokes in a year than some comics do in their entire career, or Dara O'Briain, who has comedy’s fastest brain, would clean up by taking the first option. If Lock has gone for the second - strangely not one call-out results in his notes throwing up a gag - I’m afraid the “Who would have thought I wouldn’t have one about that?” shtick wears thin pretty quickly.

The two-and-a-half hours (with an interval) feels a bit stretched, not helped by audience battleships dangerously slowing the pace - although I’m told it has produced comedy gold at other nights on tour. So do Lock a favour and shout out “B for bunting” - he has a cracker of a joke.

• Sean Lock is touring Britain until 12 November
• Find Sean Lock on Amazon