Like a gremlin freshly escaped from Sir Henry’s crumbling mansion at Rawlinson End, or the bastard son of Edward Gorey and Cate Blanchett, Andrew Lawrence peels back his straggly hair and shields his eyes against the stage lights. His mouth opens in a crooked grin of recognition - we’ve been spotted.

Indeed we have, and there’s no escaping. With a rare display of delight, the otherwise miserable Lawrence proceeds to detail in darkly dippy tones the story of his life. First of all, he is ginger and has always been so, causing even his own family to abandon him in Croydon and schoolkids to abuse him in the playground. You don’t want to laugh but you do, even when he takes you places you really don’t want to go.

And Lawrence exhumes quite a few dark places, most notably in the song where his soaring warble relates the tale of the unwelcome return of the corpse of the ex-girlfriend he left for dead in a lake. There are red herrings galore as his left-field reasoning somehow gets us into a perfectly plausible story about the right to poo all over John Lewis’ bed department or wondering which part of the family cat’s anatomy his Malteser has been in.

Although he still has a little way to go, his awesome timing and ability to suspend belief at 500 yards make Lawrence the perfect choice for a TV vehicle.