It often strikes me that our top stand-up comedians are coming to see themselves increasingly as rock stars – and none more so that Ricky Gervais, a star with an ego to easily match Bono and Robbie Williams. On his return to the New Theatre, he walks on to a Hammer Horror set that could have been borrowed from Alice Cooper, to the thunderous sound of The Who’s Baba O’Riley. It was the second of his two Oxford shows on what is billed the Science Tour.

He wasted little time in reminding us that we were fortunate to be catching “a legend” at such a comparatively intimate venue. His forthcoming Wembley Arena, date, he informed us, is really “a warm-up for Madison Square Garden”. He certainly does debauched as well as any heavy metal band you could mention. A film of him throwing up in a toilet, having over indulged on . . . well, let’s just pass on what it was . . . immediately preceded his arrival.

But once on stage, clutching a can of Fosters, he is straight into familiar Gervais obsessions, many which interestingly were shared by his greatest comedy creation in The Office. An hilarious story about a hefty woman in leggings at an open-air Ken Dodd concert of all places, leads to a 15-minute diatribe about fat people. How this goes down across the pond you can only wonder.

The Oxford Book of Quotations and a Noah’s Ark book from his Sunday school days are produced as he gets stuck into Oscar Wilde and the Old Testament. But an hour into the show you were left wondering where the Science came into all this. Nobody was expecting him to do 20 minutes on nuclear fusion, but a provocative reference to the atom bomb and a spider mime hardly warranted the elaborate Frankenstein set.

Unlike Billy Connolly, Gervais has not yet found America to be a gold mine of fresh material. After all those movies, Emmys, Golden Globes and Oscars, you might have thought he would be bursting with stories about LA excess. Instead he settles for an hilarious post 9/11 story of personal paranoia. But then the odd thing about Gervais, he is at his funniest when he is just being ordinary.