I am surprised that Mark Steel – or his management – chose the North Wall as his Oxford venue. Delightful as it is, it is relatively small, and many of Steel’s peers in the stand-up world have sold out the Playhouse or even the New Theatre. Maybe, having made his name on Radio 4 on a variety of shows, it is an intimate atmosphere that attracts him. Perhaps it is the undeniable similarity to a bear-pit that suits the ranting nature of his show. Stand-ups give names to their tours: Steel’s is What’s Going On? and for well over two hours, that was indeed the unspoken question hovering over every subject he tackled.

Steel approaches everything with doleful brutality, and while his targets are familiar, his critiques are apt and hard-hitting. At random: “Nothing works!”, “The Olympics are humiliating us”, “Tesco stores come up through cracks in pavements like bindweed”, “Gordon Brown looks hopeless: he requires a special-needs teacher”, “Goodwin, give us our money back, you thieving sh-t!”

Excoriation of bankers is easy at the moment, but Mark Steel has always identified himself as a man of the old Left and has no need to justify his loathing: “Sack ’em. We should peel their skin off and cover them with marmalade and stick them to pigs and then feed them to wasps in the greenhouse.” The audience seemed to enjoy that, although I felt he walked a finer line, in North Oxford, with a brief assault on the Starbucks’ café culture and his spirited go at private education. The latter was impressive – given that he must have known that the North Wall is on St Edward’s School land.

Some of Steel’s cleverest moments came when he laughed at his own political background: the perceived ineptitude of Organised Left meetings and the ghastliness of George Galloway, ludicrously offensive tee-shirts and the quaint predictability of Tony Benn’s memories.

Steel could well take out about half-an-hour’s worth of material: the format is, in the end, a shopping list of complaints and he is a sharp enough performer to realise that he doesn’t need to take pot shots at soft targets like call centres and TV property shows.