Hay Festival 2012: Tim Minchin, review Sitting next to me in the Barclays Pavilion at the Telegraph Hay Festival was a well-spoken man in his fifties, with a beard and a zip-up cardigan. "Have you seen Tim Minchin before?" he asked me before the show started. Then, with some enthusiasm: "He's very profane. And anti-religious. That just about sums up Minchin's cabaret show - not least its closing number, Woody Allen Jesus, in which Minchin compares our saviour not only to Mr Allen, but also to Derren Brown, a lizard, a vampire and a zombie. Schoolboy irreverence flecked through the whole show, with Minchin taking infectious delight in certain swearwords and sexual practices that are, perhaps, best not repeated in a family newspaper. Minchin's set alternated between his own songs - which he sings, Victoria Wood-style, from behind a piano - and monologues. ("The soliloquies have got better since he did the Albert Hall," said the man next to me afterwards. "Tighter.") In the song Prejudice, Minchin sang about a taboo word that is "a couple of Gs, an R and and an E, an I and an N" - which turns out to be "ginger," rather than any racial slur. Minchin's own hair is shoulder-length, and an Aveda treatment in condition away from Rebekah Brooks's. Given that much of the act relies on that kind of fairly precise wordplay, it was a shame that Minchin's three-piece band drowned out much of what he was singing for much of the time. "That didn't happen when he played with an orchestra," lamented the man next to me. But middle-aged men like us aren't Minchin's target demographic. It's ironic - given Minchin's distaste for Christianity - that he evidently inspires almost messianic devotion among his young fans. They were at Hay in their hundreds, and shouted and whooped back to Minchin with word-perfect knowledge of his material. They'd obviously been before.