He started with a stage dive and ended by tenderly feeling up a member of the audience. But if Johnny Vegas's return to stand-up was bigger on sexual harassment than it was on one-liners - “I never knew a librarian could rescue me from having no material,” he rasped, deep into his deeply wrong wooing of the woman - it also reminded us just how much comic charisma he has to play with. A bit more practice, a lot more material, and Vegas could soon be the hypnotically hilarious disaster area he was in the late Nineties.

Vegas was the mystery-guest headliner at the first of the host Stewart Lee's cheerfully oversold series of Friday-night double bills. Lee has picked ten acts he knows and likes, and who are available - Daniel Kitson couldn't do it, Jerry Sadowitz wouldn't do it - and put two of them on each week alongside himself.

For consistency and polish it was the compere's night. Lee's laconic articulacy doggedly pushed its luck on a series of modern-day taboos, from political correctness - he's for it - to corporations paying lipservice to ethical issues - he doesn't buy it.

The first guest, Simon Munnery, was less current. Munnery is a deconstructive genius who has struggled to construct the right format for himself since his character acts Alan Parker, Urban Warrior (a spoof of Eighties anarchists) and the League Against Tedium (a Nietzschean superman). Here he reagitated the strident Parker, performed him well, gave us some typically brilliant reversals - “What happens if the unthinkable happens? I've thought about it” - but was always in the shadow of Alan's obsolescence - “a now-irrelevant social parody”, as Lee affectionately labelled him at the end.

Vegas, in safari jacket and billowy slacks, is as relevant as his own battered anger will allow. Blurring the boundary between character comedy and stream of consciousness, this priapic, pathetic, sodden showbiz figure brought delectable danger to the room. “You're a good listener,” he told the librarian, lying on his belly at the front of the stage. “Maybe it's because you're petrified.”

Vegas's cajoling of the crowd would have been more exciting if it hadn't been pretty much his only trick. But it felt as if anything could happen even if, as often as not, it didn't. This week the Nineties legends, Harry Hill and Boothby Graffoe, will be more consistent, but for anecdotal value after the show they're unlikely to compete.

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