Dylan Moran, Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - review

Best known as the constantly semi-drunk chain-smoking proprietor of Black Books, the TV sitcom set in a barely functioning book shop, Moran has actually kicked the booze and fags habits but the world weariness remains. If Dave Allen had a glass of whisky as a prop, his 21st century successor now has a red tea pot.

Moran had already cast a cynical eye over the county town, Shrewsbury-Shrowsbury, the sort of place with 'delis that stock nine kinds of hummus, and a box of fudge costs £12'.

"Where am I, Shropshire... A E Housman, cows, death," he added during the preamble to his 80-minute Dr Cosmos stand-up show.

There was a sprinkling of politics: the orange thing in the big house could only be topped by a chicken drumstick in a bobble hat as president; Theresa May's face appeared to be trying to crawl off her body; while the debate and negotiation on Brexit was likened to deciding whether or not to have mayonnaise on a s**t sandwich. But mostly it was about love, death and crisps, you know, the important stuff.

There was also his dismay at a modern world which has talking toilets on trains and offers 'quail and sorrel crisps'. He preferred the days when phones were still attached to buildings.

What really marks out Moran is a poetic turn of phrase. Like how he described the sound of his wife sleeping as 'like two bees agreeing in the distance' whereas he sounds like 'a bad man hurting a bag of ducks'. Or when he compared the typical TV advert shower, with shampoo like some kind of 'caramel sex', to the reality of 'a pig in a typhoon in a phone box having a panic attack'.

His surrealist tendencies also saw that mainstay of 1970s Irish cuisine the Findus pancake described as 'a Walrus scrotum stuffed with badger meat' and him revealing he can no longer eat anything spicier than 'room temperature snow.'

He truly turns grumbling into an art form.