"Braille that says 'Wet Paint'..."

A good night and a strong line-up tonight, the first of which was St Helens-based comic Dave Twentyman.

Dave took to the stage in his usual slightly shambolic way with tales of the delights St Helens has to offer and his home life much to the amusement of the crowd. Thankfully he stayed reasonably sober (ish) so the set went reasonably to plan, which is a good thing because Dave's got some great material in there, my favourite being where he asks a member out of the audience what their favourite planet is: "Earth? That's a bit boring - it's like missionary." As usual he took a while to leave the stage but it was a decent gig from Dave.

Next on, trying out some new material, was Mike Landers.

Well, it was actually a mixture of new and not quite so new. The new (ish) material consisted of material about The Last Samurai and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Some of the new gags didn't quite work but with a bit of polishing they could do. The asthmatic blowjob line was a winner though, and there were plenty of 'bankers' to fall back on which were pretty much guaranteed laughs. So a pretty good set over all.

Next up was a comic who last played Malarkey's way back in January 2003, Andrew Bird.

Andrew did about twenty minutes and had some fantastic material and a good, confident stage presence. The bit about film critics talking all the time like they write in reviews isn't a massively original idea but it was well executed: "Hello, sweetheart, did you have a good day at school?" "Vibrant and very enjoyable... funny and uplifting... irresistable... a sensuous delight... deliciously subversive." There was plenty of other top-notch material as well. In fact, you could say it was 'vibrant and enjoyable'.

After the break the crowd were treated to a last-minute short set from Jason Manford.

Jason had some new material (including a bit about the girl who pretended to have a bomb in her bag at an American airport), plus some of the more familiar material. One of the highlights was the story about how he nearly killed his mate with a helium cannister. Plenty of little one-liners dotted throughout the set and a couple of adlibs made a nice little seven minute set from Jason. There was further hilarity when, on leaving Bar XS, he got twatted in the face with a snowball thrown by local scallies. Naturally he went into a strop at them but tried to laugh it off when he discovered a few of us looking out of the window at him!

Main support act of the night, and making his XS Malarkey debut, Barry Castagnola took to the stage next.

Barry opened up with some promising material about the City v Spurs game (presumably from his accent he's a Spurs fan) and a few jibes at David Seaman before following it up with material about making New Year's resolutions. Most of the material was pretty sound and the delivery was good but I'm not sure I'd say he was quite good enough to headline Malarkey's - possibly because we've been fairly spoilt for choice and quality in the last year or so. What I'd call a 'solid' act.

Headliner of the night was Kiwi comic Al Pitcher.

Al started off the set by chucking a snowball at the wall behind him that someone in the audience had previously thrown at Toby while he was onstage, and went into a surreal bit featuring squirrels - bizarre! He did do some material but I think tonight he adlibbed and waffled too much. Although he wasn't helped by the fact that Lemn Sissay was in and was pissed by this time (as usual) and kept on heckling. So rather a disjointed and shambolic set from Al - it was still funny but I've seen him do much better. However, there was one great bit where he got Bar XS regular Del onto the stage...

Spider.