IF anyone spots a middle-aged wizard walking around Trago Mills in Falmouth today, do not be surprised.

Comedian, wildlife expert and musical maestro Bill Bailey said he would last night, so there.

The mercurial, bearded Bath-born funny man was in the third of his four-show run of his Larks In Transit tour at the Hall for Cornwall and Trago was almost as high on the agenda as it had been on the previous two nights.

Bailey is charming, whimsical and mild mannered, but the repeated references to the store from the Truro audience almost sent him to distraction.

True to form though, he hastily created two musical ditties poking fun at the shop, after which one member of the crowd felt necessary to bellow: "Tis cheaper at Trago".

What must these visitors to our great county think of us?

Bailey gently paced back and forth on stage whilst walking us through "scripted" material about Twitter, wildlife and heavy metal Christmas carols.

After asking if anyone played in a metal band, "brass", was the slightly timid reply from near the front row.

"Your band is called Kevin?" he asked, when she attempted to explain she was a member of St Keverne Band.

By design or otherwise, the show is rambling and open-ended, with the 53 year-old doing his best to convince us that he's almost - but not quite - forgotten what he's supposed to be doing or saying.

One brief interaction with a member of the audience ended abruptly when he said: "Well, that was like walking across a windswept beach to a cafe that you discover is closed."

His "throw-away", lines would doubtless be less off-the-cuff were you to watch him more than once, but it mattered not.

His facial expressions (Donald Trump was particularly grotesque), musicality and gentle style made for a joyful evening. He is quintessentially English and his quirky, side-swipe observations ("Ed Sheeran is half tangerine, half Ewok") were lapped up by a Cornish race tuned into his dry, wry sense of humour.

He played at least six different instruments, his singing voice would probably make it through a few X Factor auditions and he even produced a rock 'n' roll finale with an AC/DC song.

In keeping with the show, the encores were seemingly random, to such an extent that some of the audience got up to leave before he had finished.

They soon sat down when his loping gait and fly-away hair reappeared to rapturous applause for a third time.