Aside from the animated "Aladdin," it is the most fluid distillation of his brilliant stand-up.
The first half opens with a brilliant, stand-alone chapter about the Brookers' tripe shop-cum-lodging house, No 22 Darlington Street.
He's still a brilliant stand-up: a poet of articulate disgust, unleashing fireballs of comedy from the hell of his own imagination.
But I had hopes that Mr. Izzard, a brilliant stand-up portraitist of human perversity, might give a jolt of shock therapy to an often glib and mechanical play.
With the two current genius sitcoms, The Office and Phoenix Nights, providing a Blur v Oasis north-south divide for our times, these tapes prove that creating a great sitcom doesn't necessarily make for brilliant stand-up tapes.
This Idea Is Brilliant stands out by identifying dozens of scientific concepts that deserve more attention, selected with input from leading thinkers such as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the technology writer Nicholas Carr.
Consumer, which Cisco chief executive John Chambers had hoped to build into a brilliant, stand-alone business, will now service traditional priorities – routers and switches, collaboration, architectures, and video.
There was Tom the Confuscist, who also happened to be a brilliant stand-up comedian.
(Then, for good measure, he cooly did brilliant stand-up at last year's White House Correspondent's Dinner).
But his "Winds of War" line is a killer, and when Weaver does a quintessential presenter comment — "They are all brilliant; I stand in awe of talent" — she gets a genial comeback from the great man.
It's brilliant because stand up on TV seems to be having some kind resurgence.
