Keith Moon: The Real Me stars Mick Berry and a drum-kit. And he calls for ‘Tax Pride Marches’ in which grateful citizens will dance through the streets rejoicing at the extra dosh they’re paying to the Treasury. A super-tax applied to the top 1 per cent of earners would add £82 billion to Britain’s health budget. A consultation with a GP should last at least 50 minutes, he argues.

And they’re wipe-clean.’ His policies have a single intention: to make doctors’ lives easier. ‘Every nurse’s uniform costs the NHS £99. His gags are good and his delivery is faultless. In Vote Dr Phil, the witty medic mingles traditional stand-up with change-the-world activism. Philip Hammond, the TV doctor, shares his name with the recently discarded Tory chancellor. ‘They are with us now - in all of us still.’ I came away from this extraordinary performance feeling curiously diminished as a human being, as if I’d been in the presence of someone more than mortal. At the end, he assured us that the gods of Greece were not dead.

He has the magical ability to conjure up the ancient world as if it were a pleasing corner of his private orchard. When Fry chose to become an actor, the world of classical scholarship lost a teacher of rare creativity and charm. The stories that Fry recounts form the basis of European literature and it’s hard to imagine that any performer in the modern age has told them with such lucidity and panache, such mesmerising freshness. In an interlude on lexicography he dashes off a memorable analysis of hieroglyphics and its replacement by the more sophisticated alphabetic system of writing. In the course of 150 minutes (and speaking without notes), Fry covers about a quarter of the Iliad and nearly all of the Odyssey, adding supplementary flourishes along the way. From here the scene moves to Troy and Fry tells the extraordinary tale of Paris - rejected by his parents but rescued by a kindly shepherd - who seduced Helen, wife of Menelaus, and brought the fractious states of Greece into a military alliance. Odysseus shows up at the palace of the local warlord, King Alcinous, and tries to explain how he came to be wearing the princess’s undergarments. This tale comes from Homer’s Odyssey, Book Six, but Fry doesn’t quote the reference he merely plunges on with the story. Now Fry, as Odysseus, begs her help and asks for a petticoat to cover his nakedness. The ball had escaped from the hands of a clumsy maidservant who was playing on the beach with a local princess. He stands up and introduces himself as Odysseus, stranded on an island-kingdom as he makes his way home after the Trojan War. A red ball rolls in from the wings and bashes him in the face. Stephen Fry lies prone on an empty stage.

Stephen fry odyssey