Roger Monkhouse, Diane Spencer and Nick Page at the Fox

I won't say that this was the best line-up I have seen at the Fox, but it was certainly a very good one. Notwithstanding you wouldn't in all probability have heard of any of them.

First up, as is our wont, Thibault and I had dinner at the Italian restaurant over the road. Have to say it was a very fine meal, once we had got over the withering, disappointed look the waitress gave us when we confessed that we were turning up without a reservation. For us it was second dinner out on consecutive nights as I had got him to join my mate John and me for a Chinese the night before. Also a great night, with a lot of humour, so the comedy had a standard to meet, Which it did.

The opener was Nick Page. I had never seen him before, but he was very much my style - ie deadpan. He did quite a long piece on his fraud sentence, and how the community service was a bargain for the quarter million he had got away with. But I most like his bit on euphemisms. I paraphrase.

"If I said I had recently given money to a charitable institution that helped support young mums, you would think that was a good thing, wouldn't you? On the other hand, if I said I had been to a lap-dancing club you wouldn't but its just a different way of phrasing the same thing."

He then followed with a similar description, but the killer end line was "However there are apparently no adequate words to explain why you have been caught having a wank to an episode of Peppa Pig,"

Diane Spencer (no relation) is a flame-haired (ie ginger) Australian comic. Not the greatest delivery, and some bits fell flat, but she had enough really good material to keep us onside. And pretty filthy. Which goes down well.

The rather weird Roger Monkhouse headlined. Again enough good material to please us, with a comfortably rambling style. I should add a very well practised rambling. He spent a lot of the time apologising to the younger generation for our generation (he is my age) having screwed things up. Sorry about that. Global warming is worrying for the youngsters, but for us, well we can do the maths. We deserve some warm weather before we die, don't we?

The Fox is not like Hammersmith Apollo. You wouldn't get the MC ask if you wanted a table at the front, and went and got us a table. Nor would you be wandering away from the venue and find the headline act jogging past you in t-shirt and shorts. Let's hear it for the Fox!