FRED MacAulay may be 51, a stand-up of some 20 years' experience and dismissive of Kerry Katona's talent as a facility for "being impregnated by ne'er do wells".
But the BBC Radio Scotland host maintains he's still a teenager at heart.
His av
uncular warmth and assured, anecdotal skill breathed life into an uninspiring tale of a German hotel clerk's dreadful service.
But it was his sniggering schoolboy mentality that really shone, appropriating advice on making love on a mountainside from an obituary column and returning to the attendant picture of a toboggan again and again, while delighting in his coinage of the term "mingery" for a lady's waxing mishap.
Slides of his five-year-old crayon scribblings revealed a struggling artist but a gifted fantasist.
Concluding the first half, this extended routine had no right being so funny, testimony to his knack for establishing engaging narratives with very little.
MacAulay claims to detest celebrities, but evoked his acquaintance with several.
This was deftly handled though, summed up by the assurance that he never uses the phrase "do you know who I am?" sober, allowing him to remain good old Fred, everybloke, while reporting back from the starry inner sanctum.
Regrettably, this mention of inebriation compelled him to trot out some excellent but now rather old material about arriving home drunk, while his John Smeaton routine is undoubtedly ageing fast.
Nevertheless, no-one else has so consistently wrung laughs from paying homage to his "boaby".
The full article contains 254 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
