As the climax to a show it is one of the best things I have ever seen on stage, because you can’t expect it.

Juggler Mat Ricardo worries me.

Last night, I went to his 60-minute show Three Balls and a Good Suit because I had seen him perform maybe 15-20 minutes at Pull The Other One in Nunhead just over a week ago and he had said – correctly – that what he would do at the end of his act was physically impossible. It was. And it is. But he did it.

Far be it from me to lapse into cliché, but I could not believe my eyes in Nunhead.

I had never seen anyone else do what he did and I have seen quite a few acts. Mat tells me that, as far as he knows, he is the only person in the world doing it, because he himself figured out how it could be done.

He did it again last night and it is still astonishing. As the climax to a show it is one of the best things I have ever seen on stage, because you don’t expect it. You can’t expect it – it is theoretically impossible.

And the build-up is impeccable because Mat – a sometime street performer – has some great audience-manipulation patter. There is an earlier dagger-juggling section in the show which is a joy to watch just from a structural point of view. Forget the juggling – the verbal patter, the build-up and the control over what the audience thinks it is seeing are a joy in themselves. It is a tribute to his experience.

But he worries me because I try to be aware of good acts and, until just over a week ago, I had never heard of Mat Ricardo. And he is more than just good.

It seems Mat has mostly worked abroad and on cruise ships though originally in street theatre, so I have some excuse, but not much. The full title of his show is Three Balls and a Good Suit: Tales From the Life of a Jaded Novelty Act. I missed it at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and should be ashamed of myself – although it was only on for the first two weeks and, in my opinion, you have to play all four weeks (especially the last two) for three consecutive years to get noticed. But still I am ashamed of myself-ish. I have a high threshold of shame. Fringe Guru not surprisingly gave the show a 5-star review – and that was without the extraordinary new final climax which is so gobsmacking.

Because it was a good show even without the final stunt. Three Balls and a Good Suit also includes one of the best dissections of the street performer’s art I have ever heard and a wonderfully caustic attack on Britain’s Got Talent – it was no news to me but it might be to some that Britain’s Got Talent regularly approaches professional acts and invites them to the auditions (with no waiting in line). No guarantee that they will get chosen, but an assumption that part of their audition will get screened, potentially getting them 2 million hits and upwards on YouTube.

Personally, I have no problem with this but Mat does and I can understand why. Still, in my opinion, 2 million hits on YouTube and a live TV audience of 8 or 10 million is worth a punt. Anyway…

I was interested that Mat said he was partly inspired to become a juggler by old re-runs of W.C.Fields movies on TV – Fields was a great stage juggler before he became a great movie comedian.

And Mat can juggle five balls.

Although I could not do it myself because I am crap at manual co-ordination, I have never been impressed by anyone juggling three balls. As far as I understand it, at any given time, one ball is in or leaving/entering one hand. Another ball is leaving/entering the other hand. So those two balls can be mentally ignored because their trajectory is certain. You only have to concentrate on the one remaining ball in mid-air.

If, you juggle four balls, there are two balls in mid-air at any given time, so to juggle four balls is twice as difficult as juggling three balls.

And if you juggle five balls, there are three balls in mid-air. So juggling five balls is three times as difficult as juggling three balls. It is bloody, bloody, bloody difficult to do.

According to Mat, his idol Enrico Rastelli could juggle ten balls.

My mind can barely comprehend the complications. I find it almost incredible.

But then Mat himself has already done one thing that is impossible.

For 25 years, I have wanted to see a man or woman juggle cooked spaghetti for more than one minute.

Mat Ricardo gives me hope.

(SPAGHETTI-JUGGLING POSTSCRIPT: Steve Ochs tells me that US comic Lenny Schultz, who was in the cast of the revived Laugh In TV show in the early 1980s, “would get club audiences to yell, Go crazy, Lenny! while he did crazy shit. Among his nutty bits, performed after he was stripped down to a Speedo, was, that’s right; cooked spaghetti juggling!”… He couldn’t actually do it, though, so my search continues.)

I have seen some unexpected acts in my life but I had never seen what I saw last night… I am still shocked.

This morning, I used the Listen Again button on the BBC’s website to hear Boothby Graffoe being interviewed on yesterday’s Radio 2 Arts Show with Claudia Winkleman (it’s 18 minutes in, but is only available online in the UK if you are reading this within seven days of me writing it).

He was on the Radio 2 show to plug his new music album Songs For Dogs, Funerals (the comma really is there – don’t ask) and his UK comedy tour, which starts next Tuesday.

I knew he was the only comedian named after the small Lincolnshire village of Boothby Graffoe but, until he mentioned it on the show, I hadn’t realised this meant he was also named after the second largest site in Europe for testing genetically-modified food. Now there’s a thing.

I listened to the Radio 2 show this morning because I bumped into Boothby last night when I went to Vivienne & Martin Soan’s always extraordinary monthly comedy club Pull The Other One in Nunhead, South London. You know a comedy gig is good when other comedians go to see it even when they’re not on the bill and Boothby just went along to see Pull The Other One before he went back home to Leicestershire.

If I were using glib phrases – which, of course, I wouldn’t dream of writing – I might say it turned into an evening of unexpected revelations.

After the show, I was chatting to Martin Soan and, despite the fact I’ve probably known him since around 1990, I never knew he wrote several sketches for Spitting Image at the height of their TV success.

It was no surprise, of course, that, during the actual Pull The Other One show itself, Bob Slayer enticed a woman from the audience onto the stage and ended carrying her off over his shoulder.

What was unexpected was the climax of Mat Ricardo’s act. He is billed as a juggler, but is more than that and he introduced the final highly-visual thing he did as “impossible”… as indeed it is, but he still did it.

After Mat’s act, there was an interval and one of the other acts – smiling broadly – just looked at me and said: “Jesus!”

Another said to me: “Jesus! I have never seen that done before.”

The Lord was being invoked quite a lot after what we saw. I was and remain so shocked by what he did that I am going to pay to go to see his full live show Three Balls and a Good Suit next week in the hope he does it again.

What he did involves a table and a tablecloth and – no – it is not at all what you think.

There is seldom anything new under the sun – but I have never heard of anyone else doing what I saw and I have certainly never seen it before.

I can’t believe I did see it.

And I have seen a lot of acts.

Jesus!