"WHAT were you expecting? The real Bill Hicks, back from the dead?"

It's halfway through Chas Early's Brighton debut, playing the legendary Bill Hicks, and he has become the victim of a vicious heckler.

The white-suited man on stage is loudly accused of being a parasite, living off the work of someone else, before his attacker is escorted firmly from the purple cow with the jeers of the audience echoing in his ears.

What that assailant singularly failed to realise was, if Chas was into cynically making money off the back of the Texan comic who died in 1994, he could have done a straight tribute act and left the stage a few hundred pounds richer.

But Slight Return is much more clever and brave.

Chas has taken Hicks's original routines, which made him a cult figure in the 13 years after his death, and used them as the basis for all-new, topical routines.

When Hicks was alive, the internet was in its infancy, not bringing porn into every home, and Bush Senior was fighting a war on drugs, not terror.

This show gives an indication of what Hicks would have talked about, were he around today.

The mannerisms were the same, the Texan drawl pretty similar, the cigarettes still punctuated the action and the same basic themes close to Hicks's heart came to the fore - sex, drugs, rock n' roll and smoking.

But this time the jokes were out of the early-Nineties time warp.

Thrown in were some killer lines about how Coldplay's Chris Martin sounded like fingernails being scraped down Thom Yorke and how Al Gore was such a loser - even when he won an election, he lost.

Occasionally, material overstepped the mark - with the Columbine exercise regime and Goat Boy's direction of the Jenna and Barbara Bush porn video particular examples. But this was frequently true of Hicks's own original routines, which aimed to challenge his audiences.

Once more, this Hicks left his audience with a message not to be complacent, in the hope they might listen this time.