Mick Foley: Prisoner Of Raw

Something's changed for Foley in the last few weeks. At the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, he tells us, he became comfortable with the fact that he is an ex-wrestler telling wrestling stories to wrestling fans. It's probably for the best. No matter what Foley does, any crowd he plays to is mainly going to consist of people wanting to know if it hurt when Undertaker threw him off the cell (and also, he acknowledges, their very patient girlfriends).

The huge audience are pretty rowdy at the start and diving straight into the wrestling stories allows Foley to placate them a little, bringing them under his control for when he wants to branch into other topics like himself and his son both having crushes on men, his horror at Scottish swearing and a segment on Obama and American foreign policy which is serious in intent but gentle in delivery.

Although he's obviously suffering from chronic back pain, Foley uses the stage well and draws in this massive audience with his abundant charisma. It's quite funny but mostly fascinating, the kind of thing that would be perhaps better suited to the Spoken Word section of the programme rather than comedy. His finest achievement is weaving the strands together, combining wrestling nostalgia, silly humour and a strongly-felt liberalism into a single idea. This new direction might not quite be the one he had intended but here, tonight, it's a success.