Did Johnny Vegas over-step the comedy mark?

It will come as little surprise to anyone in comedy that, according to the Guardian today, during a recent show at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, the comedian Johnny Vegas over-stepped the mark. That's what Vegas does. He blunders alcoholically across every mark, every boundary, every line in the sand you can draw. In a sense, that's what he's for.

On this occasion even those who condemn his actions admit that half his audience were convulsed with laughter. What they were seeing was exactly what they had paid to see - Vegas overstepping the mark again.

So what did they see? Witnesses say a nervously giggling girl, sitting in the front row of the audience, was manoeuvred onto the stage, and made to lie flat. It is alleged that Vegas then variously stroked her breasts, raised her skirt, ran his hand up her leg,

fingered her through her clothes, and finally straddled her and kissed her extensively. It was behaviour which would constitute sexual assault if he did it in public - which, when you think about it, he did.

Writing in the Guardian, Mary O'Hara, who attended the show, said Vegas "clearly had no idea where he was going with his act". Of course he didn't. He never does. His technique, even in television interviews, is to ramble, until he touches a nerve or draws a reaction. Then he can rapidly become very funny.

The technique of involving the audience in the act is not new in comedy. Bob Monkhouse would stroll along the front row of tables at his cabaret gigs, ask each woman her name, and then haul an appropriate joke or song out of his prodigious memory. He claimed it never went wrong.

More offensively, when the team from the C4 satirical show Who Dares Wins, to which I was a regular contributor, took to the stage in the 1980s, the performers pretended to promote safe sex, and invited pretty