Mark Steel is in the middle of a joke when a woman in the front row gets up and hands him her mobile phone. For a minute he is dumbstruck, the room teeters on the brink, then we put our faces in our hands — “no, please, no!”

“Only in Oxford would someone be that confident,” he quips, not sure yet where the audience wants him to go with this. “‘You look like a member of the working class’,” he hazards in an upper-crust Oxford accent, “could you fix this for me?”

We burst out laughing. The tension is broken. It’s a close thing, and there is a lot of hit and miss tonight.

The first series of Radio 4’s Mark Steel’s In Town saw him visit quirky corners of the country such as Chipping Norton, hunting the locals’ eye view, beyond the tour guides. To an outsider he usually seemed to have got under the skin of a place. But his attempts to get under the stony skin of Oxford were not an unbridled success. He read from crib sheets.

“Does everyone know about the Cutteslowe Walls?” he attempts. “Yes,”

everyone replies in unison.

“Well don’t say it like that,” he shouts, “like I’m the bloody substitute teacher – ‘yes sir, we all know about the Cutteslowe Walls’.”

We all laugh, but it is exactly like that. At one point he brings up a picture of the Botley Bag Lady — “Do you all know who this is?” “It’s the Botley Bag Lady!” we cry.

“So what’s the deal with her, then? What’s her story?” Silence. No one in Oxford tonight knows what the Botley Bag Lady’s story is. If Mark Steel has come to lift the lid on Oxford’s seedy underbelly, he’s failed.

He hits it more on the head when he does his wrap-up of how diverse the rest of Oxfordshire is. “Chipping Norton is full of people who have made it good in London then moved out to the country, got a gravel drive and a statue, don’t know what it’s of; met Jeremy Clarkson the other day at the pub, good bloke.

“Then you’ve got places like Woodstock, where the parish records clearly state you may not live within the town boundary unless your family has for nine generations been in the Admiralty.

“Then you’ve got Didcot, where people go: “I had a wicked weekend, got lathered up, went up Chipping Norton, nicked some bloke’s statue.”

The majority of the show is stories from his tours of the country or his native South London, which are far funnier. You sort-of wish he hadn’t tried to “do Oxford”. The one bit he did nail was his opening gambit — “What about trying to get into this place? The road system looks like it was designed by a maths professor.”

On a day when most people took more than an hour to get into work, it was appreciated, but it seemed that driving in was all the first-hand insight he actually had of Oxford.