SHORTLY before 8pm they were just Bill the engineer and Sarah the chemical analyst.

Two hours later and we all knew a darn sight more about the couple from Middlesbrough who just happened to sit on the front row and by the end of it were the stars – whether they wanted to be or not – of the show.

They've been going out three years, so Hall, as bluff as a Montana mountain face, asked Bill – fresh from finishing designing a chemical plant in Hull – if Sarah was the one for him?

“Maybe,” he said.

Ouch.

While some of the men might not have spotted it, the women in the audience certainly knew that was the wrong answer.

To be honest, it was perhaps a little unfair to put the young couple on the spot, but Hall wasn't finished there.

Adept at spontaneous song-writing, he later struck up his guitar, found the relevant rhyming couplets and ended by presenting Bill with a presentation box containing an engagement ring.

“Go on,” we all thought, what better way to remember the day you asked her to marry you? But Bill, like the structures he designs, stood firm.

To their credit, the couple, along with Ashley the beer seller and the student who came with his mam and whose bladder wouldn't hold out until the end of the show, took Hall's quips in their stride.

In between the conversations with his front row friends, he addressed all manner of topics from this side of the pond and yonder.

Like that bloke who sits at the end of the bar with a pint and a fag railing against the world, Hall is full of opinions, but what marks him out is that all possess more than a modicum of common sense.

He talks about the US obsession with guns and bumper stickers, his countrymen's insular nature, the unfathomable workings of a coalition government, why you can say 'f***' on the BBC after 9pm, but not 'midget' and just what Don Johnson said to the Queen during a gathering of Americans who had contributed to British culture.

His observations on those who live on a certain road just around the corner from last night's gig, meanwhile, are perhaps best left, like Bill and Sarah's would-be engagement ring, in the venue.