One of the few comics to do a full run at last year’s depleted Fringe, Tom Little returns with an almost entirely new show. He clearly creates material as fast as he speaks, with a frenetic energy that brings an urgency to his routines.

That eager speed of delivery, combined with his Cumbrian accent and a microphone held way too low for effective amplification, means the audience must lean in to focus on his stories. That lends the show an intimacy, helped by a nervous innocence that both makes him vulnerable and fires his overactive imagination as he tries to make sense of a confusing world.

The tale at the heart of this year’s show is a particularly tall one, taking a throwaway tagline about a pre-Covid encounter with a stranger on a train and expanding it to be the core of his imagined life. But it’s never quite convincing, even in his alternative reality.

He expends a lot of energy trying to persuade us that this accidental relationship – burgeoning because he’s too polite or anxious to break it – is true. And to little avail, as it remains hard to stay on board with the conceit, even at a fictional level.

Not that documentary accuracy is important for Little. He has a charmingly silly routine about yoghurt which almost certainly never happened, but one foot in reality is always a help.  Highlights include a apparently genuine bafflement at being served water with chunks of cucumber in it, to him wondering why Penguins are called that, which he spins out into an imagined meeting of biscuit executives.

His best routines such as these, are distinctive slices of absurd observation, which feel diluted by his made-up frustrations about the made-up way his made-up life has turned out.
 

• Tom Little Has Good Reviews So Prepare to Be Impressed is on at PBH's Free Fringe at Subway at 3.45pm.