Comic poet John Hegley was awarded 9-and-a-99/100th out of 10 according to one nine-year-old audience member after his hilarious show at the Komedia.

With his lugubrious demeanour, tall and rangy in his slick skinny jeans, he’s more like a cool, veteran rockstar than a poet.

His low-key, world-weary delivery as he shrugged on to the stage was as far from a children’s entertainer as you could imagine.

His absolute silliness was a shock and a joy as he instantly engaged the audience in making little dog shapes with their hands, with the audience ending up telling their hands, "You really take the biscuit."

Hegley’s poems are funny, poignant and quietly anarchic. Many were actually songs which he accompanied on the guitar or ukulele while others were not exactly poems – more like two-line jokes. A lot involved animals and poems about families.

He used pictures and cartoons to illustrate them and happily incorporated the audience into his performance, encouraging it to follow some complex manoeuvres for his song about a guillemot (which had everyone in stitches) and fill in the missing gaps in a rhyme about an octopus.

Throughout, he managed to keep an utterly straight face, endlessly telling the children how soon it would be until the show ended and they could escape.

Despite his entreaties, the children were in no rush for it to be over and neither were the grown-ups.