Ross Noble: Mindblender, New Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, review Now then, now then, what have we here? Ross Noble doing topical material about the Jimmy Savile affair? That's a turn-up for the books. If it was Jimmy Carr, I'd expect nothing less - molestation quips are his forte. But on the night I caught Noble's latest touring show, Mindblender, the wizard-haired Geordie - currently making his cinematic debut in Stitches as a revenant children's entertainer bent on revenge - devoted a fair five minutes of his set to seeing the funny side to this super-creepy posthumous saga. Coming from a comic who usually spins the most minor on-stage occurrence or passing fancy into protracted, hallucinogenic riffs, the allusion to real-world events sounded almost as incongruous as David Cameron breaking into a rap-routine mid-PMQs. It raised a lot of laughter, though. "Those people weren't even taking part in the marathons - they were trying to run away from him," Noble chortled, meandering around the idea that almost every celebrity conspicuously involved in charity work must be hiding something. Widening the scope of his inquiry, he joked about his anxieties about Bono and Bob Geldof, deciding that the U2 frontman kept the aid grain for himself and that Geldof's garden is full of wells; enough surrealism there to avoid the whiff of libel. I'm sure Noble's two hours of tomfoolery will have long since morphed into a different configuration. With his act the only constant is the set - on this occasion a cross between a ghoulish theme-park ride and cheap sci-fi. As ever, his improvisation skills are second to none, as is his ability to blend in his prepared banter. When he's spouting nonsense on the subject of Bruce Wayne's hoarse voice in The Dark Knight Rises, you might almost be watching a kid clowning about in his bedroom for his own amusement, and yet the pace never slackens and his grasp of phrasing and timing is fully matured. In Birmingham, references to other TV celebrities besides Savile - among them Derek Acorah, Dr Christian Jessen (drolly confused with the sadistic hero of Fifty Shades of Grey), Eamonn Holmes and Paddy McGuinness - all form part of the mix, but they're shaken into a head-spinning cocktail of the sort that no other stand-up could dispense. Pretty much the perfect autumnal pick-me-up.