Andy Hamilton, Blackheath Halls

Most people know Andy Hamilton from his frequent (and very droll) appearances on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz on television and radio, but he is also a prolific writer. His writing credits could take up the whole of this review, but a brief CV includes Not the Nine O’Clock News, Drop the Dead Donkey, Old Harry’s Game and, most recently, the equally excellent Outnumbered on BBC One, which he co-writes with Guy Jenkin. But now, with Hat of Doom, he is going back to where he started in comedy and doing a stand-up tour.

He gets the measure of his audience straight away, doing, as he calls it, a bit of market research in what I am contractually obliged to describe as the leafy suburb of Blackheath in south London. It’s a middle-class enclave and his audience is mostly drawn, we soon learn, from his Radio Four fanbase; the greyer ones are News Quiz fans, the teenagers and twentysomethings love the dark satire of Old Harry’s Game, in which Hamilton also appears as a world-weary Satan. He gently guys them about being Radio Four listeners, and they love it.

The diminutive Hamilton also deals with his lack of height at the top of the show, too. Introduced as “taller than Sandi Toksvig”, Hamilton looks like a squashed Luciano Pavarotti. Because he’s so short, he tells us, many people think he’s in a wheelchair when he appears behind a desk on TV panel shows; his son mischievously added the erroneous detail to Hamilton’s Wikipedia entry, which he discovered only when a venue offered to put in a ramp when he was due to appear there. Clearly there’s a funny gene running through the Hamilton household.

That may strike some people as rather unPC, but then Hamilton is the butt of much of his humour and there’s no malice in it at all. In fact, an evening with him is a pleasantly laidback experience as he tells jokes, showbiz anecdotes and stories (many of which he swears are true). He also does a bit of deliberately half-hearted audience participation and even sings a folk song at one point to deliver a very fine payoff. As Hamilton stands on stage chatting away, it feels like being down the pub with a very witty and erudite mate. He never gets angry or shouty and there are no whizz-bang stage effects; this is a show that revels in being lo-fi.

His strongest material, as one would expect from a satirist, is mint-fresh from the election - Lib Dem voters should now, he says, understand the true meaning of the single transferable vote. He also riffs drily on what it’s like to be mistaken for tabloid columnist Garry Bushell (“Who’s he?” one frightfully posh woman beside me asked her husband - lucky her, I say), living with teenagers, working with children on Outnumbered and the perils of taking public transport. Hamilton prefers to take taxis, “just to keep up with world affairs”.

A few of his stories are suggested by prompt words that people pull out of the titular hat, which he carries down into the audience, and in the second half Hamilton answers questions left on the stage during the interval; I’m sure at least a few of them were indeed genuinely from the audience. But who cares, it’s a neat construct that leads to some more funny and subtle observations, engagingly delivered.

• Andy Hamilton is touring until 13 June
• Find Andy Hamilton on Amazon