Mr Nicolas Parsons deserves a slap for inflicting this pile of steaming tosh on a paying audience.  This was an embarrassing, pointless and sad show to witness with an unenthusiastic performer trading off his past triumphs and promising much and delivering so very very little.

Let’s get something out the way, I adore Mr Parsons, and have done for years but last night’s show was like coming home to find your boyfriend in bed with your brother (and his wife). Disappointing in such a huge way that I will probably never get over it.

Mr Parsons is supposed to be a very experienced, agile and funny performer and certainly has many years of experience behind him, he's 86 – older than Bruce Forsyth - and after more than 40 years at the helm of Radio 4’s ‘Just a minute’ one might even venture that he has a cult following. However like all cults this one was all about HIM and ended with a mass suicide attempt by the audience to escape.

This was arrogance at its worse, and behind the fixed grin of this rictus performer I could smell the loathing. If this is the best you can do Mr P then it’s time to stop working live. If you think the show is worth the money that was charged then you’re either a merciless exploiter of festival punters or the triumph of self delusion, possibly both.

Billed as a ‘interactive audience centred show with guests’ this was nothing less than an hour wasting everyone’s time, and at your advanced years Mr Parsons that’s a huge gamble to take. 

The guests were pointless and unfunny, Parsons didn’t’ listen to (or couldn’t hear) any of the answers and treated them with bemused tolerance before going off again into his slightly creepy and beyond parody patter.  Continuously asking the audience for subject matters so he could ‘spin a joke out of it’ he then ignored each and every suggestion, dismissing most of them, before launching himself into another pointless rambling anecdote about his rather delightfully twee & privileged life. Yawn.

The biggest laughs of the night came from the hecklers. After Parsons had played a song he recorded in 1973 and mimed a bit over it in a half hearted way an ambulance went by, with it’s sirens blaring, one of the hecklers shouted, ‘that’s for you’. I think it would have been too late if it was. Mr Parsons died some time earlier on this stage and what we witnessed was a smug reanimation of his own ego.

Sad, pathetic, insulting and the worst thing I have seen in a long time.  The audience were as bemused at this travesty as I was and there were dark and angry mutterings as they left.  We had all haemorrhaged enthusiasm by then anyway. What a rotten night, and what a terrible disappointment too.

Full venue listings here: www.brightonfestivalfringe.org.uk/ticketing/index.aspx?vn=1949