Come the election, I’m voting ash. Nick Clegg in all his borrowed glory could not compete with the inexorable rise of the best thing ever to have come out of Iceland (Ikea was the other lot, right?). This rise culminated in a starring role for our favourite mass of jet-bothering carcinogens in the first Smoker of this term.

Like the ash – whose only downside is its habit of creating news footage of budget holidayers streaked with rivulets of cheap mascara, and ugly suitcases – this Smoker was pretty much all good. An early blip – some guy pretending to his girlfriend they were on holiday, or something – was followed by a set of middling quality by determined stand-upper Pierre Novellie, and it looked like we could be on something of a downer.

From then on in, however, it was pretty much all gold. Discount one aberration – a love poem to Shakespeare that was ghastly in its hand-wringing clever-clever Cambridge smugness – and there wasn’t a single bum note.

We had good sketches, but more impressively we had great stand-up. Adam Lawrence was a wonderful, natural presence at the mic – so much so that his previous incarnations as a gurning Tigger-for-hire seem a total waste of his undoubted talent. Jacob Shepard was equally assured, and equally excellent. Danish Babar delivered a set that, as smoke was sprayed through the auditorium, appropriately brought the house down.

I’m not sure how to categorise other highlights – chief among them Lucien Young’s exquisite parody of the as-yet-unpublished Jordan novel Topaz – but the fact is that most of this stuff was fucking brilliant. And you probably missed it. Feel excluded? Welcome to the aftermath of Election 2010, when you and your pinko fruitloop friends will be sitting around liberally, and I’ll be toasting four more years of lash, gash, and ash.