You’ll probably have seen Lost Voice Guy on Live At The Apollo on television but won’t have heard his voice.

For Lost Voice Guy (LVG), aka Lee Ridley, is unable to speak after being disabled since early life due to a combination of brain infection and cerebral palsy.

But Ridley is nothing but a fighter and, after a career in journalism, particularly in his native north east, he turned to comedy.

This, legend has it, followed an encounter with Ross Noble when he challenged the comedian that he could do a better impersonation of Stephen Hawking.

And he first came to national prominence when winning the 2018 series of Britain’s Got Talent.

Using a voice-synthesiser he performs his own pre-written material, which, on paper, sounds like it lacks spontaneity, but that’s not the point, and it doesn’t anyway.

Here he was, headlining the latest Colossal Coastal Comedy event in the theatre at Lighthouse rather than the much smaller studio.

It was far from full, but the audience remained enthusiastic throughout a long evening – are two intervals strictly necessary?

LVG was helped on to stage and sat in a director’s chair with an iPad on a small table next to him. His role is to push buttons at the right time, which he does with aplomb.

He eschewed his usual song and dance routine to concentrate on the comedy, bemoaning that the posh old man voice of his synthesiser made chat-up lines difficult, suggesting that he sometimes used two iPads to argue with himself and claiming that he had two children called Siri and Alexa.

He switched to a Geordie voice at one point but said people wouldn’t be able to understand him and he reckoned automatic machines at banks were always taking the mickey out of him.

His funniest line was about trying to buy something over the phone with his voice synthesiser reading out his 16-digit credit card number as an actual number, making progress impossible. You had to be there, really.

Although a routine such as this does have its limitations and one might feel that some really strong new material would be needed to want to see LVG again, it was a real coup for Coastal Comedy to attract him again.

Support came firstly from the couldn’t-be-camper gossipy comedian Stephen Bailey whose schtick is mainly his gayness. Rude, but not overtly crude (mostly) he did manage to raise a titter despite that annoying habit that many comedians have of continually looking at their watches.

North Devon’s Luke Honnoraty, a substitute for the advertised Laura Smyth, amused with his warm, observational comedy. He mused on subjects ranging from fatherhood to poshness to some effect and is down to host the next Coastal event – on May 13 at Lighthouse.

Compere, as usual was Adrienne Coles who revealed, on the day that Barry Humphries died, that she once worked as a Dame Ednagram.