Danny Baker loves to talk. He loves to talk a lot. Mostly he talks about himself, which is great if you are a fan.

My wife isn’t a fan. She fidgeted a lot.

She was very much in a minority though in a disappointingly half-full City Hall where the irrepressible BBC Radio Five Live host and erstwhile Daz spokesman regaled us with stories from his life.

His gift, and his curse, is an almost total recall, it seems, of every event in a chaotic life that saw him leave school at 14 to work in a Soho record shop frequented by Elton John and Marc Bolan, stumble into the punk revolution and then on to the staff job of the NME before winding up on TV.

He is a human jukebox of anecdote and pop culture whose whip crack mind refuses to let him finish a story if it alights on another related tale midway through.

His first tour, which dealt with his early life (by which I mean the age of 0 to seven) didn’t make it to Salisbury but that didn’t stop him embarking on a 20-minute ‘catch-up’ that actually occupied the first 45 minutes of his set. He was well over an 90 minutes in before the production team began playing music to force him off.

By 11pm he still hadn’t got much further than his late teens. I could see people around me doing mental calculations: “It’s taken him two-and-a-half-hours to get to 19. He’s 61 now. Good grief Daphne, we’ll be here until Sunday teatime.”

Not surprisingly his speech pattern was up to the pace of a horse racing commentator in the closing straight of the Grand National by the close in order to get us out by 11.30pm. he still hadn’t reached his 30s. At this rate he’ll need to tour until he’s 107 just to get us to the Millennium.

Not that he wasn’t entertaining. Far from it. The warmth of his family stories, a few of which will be familiar to viewers of BBC1 sitcom Cradle to Grave, the quality of the star-laden anecdotes and the grandiose nature of the characters he has encountered made the evening whizz by.

He is a brilliant raconteur in the same entertainment league as Kenneth Williams, Peter Ustinov and Roger Moore. Only with more stories about Millwall.

His ebullience and refusal to be bashful about his success could be seen as vanity and maybe even self-aggrandisement but I think it is pure excitement that just can’t be helped.

As we left a man in front said to his wife: “I wish we’d seen him 20 years ago, he would have had less to talk about.”

I somehow doubt it.

REVIEW BY GARY LAWRENCE