If ever a tour was absolutely perfectly titled, then this is the one. Can’t Stop Talking describes Gyles Brandreth’s current one man show to a T (or perhaps a tee, as we’re being a bit wordy here).

Needless to say, our star was engaged in his favourite activity, talking, about this, that and the other. And much more besides.

Here he was, still slogging around the country at the age of 75 on an 18-date tour in provincial theatres.

Why? Because he is very good at it. The majesty of his Chrysostomic eloquence (to quote another) had the pretty packed audience spellbound from the word go.

Essentially, this was Gyles telling his life story, a roller-coaster of random tales and revelations from his unlikely life in showbusiness and politics.

This grandiloquent rhetorician has, of course, plenty of material to fall back on, having been, variously, (deep breath here) a broadcaster, author, children’s writer, biographer, MP (for Chester in the 1990s), Government Whip, interviewer, columnist, after-dinner speaker, awards ceremony host, actor, panel show regular, podcaster (with Susie Dent) and, famously, a jumper wearer.

The star of This Morning Pointless, QI, Would I Lie To You?, Sunday Brunch, The One Show, Just A Minute and Celebrity Gogglebox, to name but a few, appeared from stage left dressed in a gilet, to the sounds of Where’s Me Jumper by Irish band The Sultans of Ping and began speaking. Two hours later he stopped.

What, no jumper? AH, It was underneath the gilet, a splendid red creation with the royal crown and CR III, but before it was revealed he had to first get in his local joke that the gilet was a flak jacket as he had come from Boscombe. Poor Boscombe gets all the stick.

He began an evening packed with namedropping with a reference to Johnny Rotten which ended with a loud expletive and brought the house down. Such a word coming from the mouth of Gyles Brandreth, whatever next?

Well, whatever next was a seemingly haphazard run through the high and lowlights of 75 years of Brandreth, but cunningly scripted to bring it back to his showstoppers, Thus, we had his Joe Biden impression, but doing Riverdance – something he maintained would be for Celebrity Britain’s Got Talent – and his idea that there should also be Celebrity Naked Attraction.

References to Ann Widdecombe, Margaret Rutherford, old codgers, daytime TV advertising, his three older sisters, local connections, and a faulty appliance to facilitate comfort breaks while undertaking his record-breaking twelve-and-a-half hour after dinner speech for charity.

A folder appeared, an audience member by the name of Louise was summoned to help his choose random aspects of his life to talk about from a menu of starter, main course and pudding.

So, we had Noel Coward, Margaret Thatcher’s lack of a sense of humour, Donald Sinden’s consonant and vowel vocal exercises, Carol Vorderman, dropping Yehudi Menuhin’s priceless Stradivarius violin into the crypt at Canterbury Cathedral, the old Queen’s propensity for doing impersonations and a Royal Variety Performance featuring the Full Monty.

The second half continued in a similar vein but with Gyles in a black sweater with a big red heart. Winnie the Pooh, the great old ham actor Sir Donald Wolfit, Dame Sybil Thorndike, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Gambon and Roger Moore giving him eyebrow acting lessons all featured.

He began to cough, did a little routine about buying Strepsils in a Poole chemist and urged the audience, as his coughing continued, to fight their way to the front to film the scene should it lead to his demise as he wanted to be immortalised on film.

He finished with a lucky dip of questions from the audience and somehow managed to squeeze in Camilla upbraiding him for suggesting she smoked Woodbines in the bushes, and also the one-legged American cartoonist Al Capp.

It was all good gentle fun from a master orator, although one had to be of a certain age to get most of his references. And it may seem like the ‘money for old rope’ tour with just a lectern and a black curtain for staging, but that negates his lifetime of collecting the material.