AS OUR demented host is the first to admit, it takes a certain calibre of talent to be sacked from the late-night TV schedules of Five. Given his general lack of tact and his inability to finish a sentence without lapsing into an obscenity, Jerry Sadowitz can be sure he will never follow Joan Rivers into building a new career as a smooth-talking television jewellery salesman.

He is doing pretty well, to say the least, as a magician. As a stand-up, Sadowitz is a loathsome proposition: there seems to be no taboo that he will not cheerfully desecrate. Give him a pack of cards, however, and he blossoms into a much more interesting companion. As an exponent of close-up trickery, he is said to be one of the very best. Mad hair, mad eyes, very clever hands. If any director ever decides to stage a modern dramatisation of Thomas Mann’s fable Mario and the Magician set in the Gorbals rather than Italy, he would be prime casting.

He has taken up residence in Soho for two weeks with no props besides some playing cards, a table and a bag of odds and ends. Irreverent to the last, he lashes out in all directions. The Magic Circle and David Blaine are two of his favourite targets; he also concocts a dressing-room feud with Jonathan Pryce, who appears at the same venue earlier in the evening in the play A Reckoning.

If he did nothing but rant, Sadowitz would very soon outstay his welcome. But he is on stage for only just over an hour, and in any case all of his barbs are laced with self-deprecating humour.

Presenting himself as the mother of all showbusiness losers, he inexorably wins us over. The rampant insults are ultimately as harmless as the racial stereotypes he flings around so freely, like some Scottish-Jewish counterpart to Jackie Mason.

It would be wrong to give away too many details of his repertoire (although Sadowitz himself seems happy to explain how some of the tricks are done). Suffice to say that, though you need to be reasonably close to the front to catch the full impact, even a jaded London audience lets out gasps from time to time. Sadowitz is so relaxed about his sleight of hand that it is easy to underestimate his skill. He is the antithesis of a bouffant prime-time showman, and all the more entertaining for that.

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