What a great bill! What a fabulous cause! What a bloomin’ relief when it all finally ended.

If that seems an uncharitable verdict on Amnesty International’s biannual comedy showcase, which returned to the Albert Hall on Saturday night, that’s more a reflection on the length of the show and the preponderance of stand-up than it is on the quality of the acts.

In fact, nostalgia be damned, this was the most consistently strong line-up in the 29-year history of an event whose founder, John Cleese, turned up here only as a brief voiceover. Starting with a rapturously received set from Frank Skinner, and ending four hours later with an interesting but overlong set from Eddie Izzard - is it missing the point of Izzard to wonder if he might edit himself a wee bit more? - this ball had serious comic muscle.

The previous event’s well-meaning sketches and animations on the theme of prisoners of conscience were gone, apart from a sketch with Graham Norton, Liza Tarbuck and Alan Carr. Gone, too, were spurious star cameos - Gok Wan excepted. Otherwise Ross Kemp and Germaine Greer talked up the cause, unsullied by gags. “So, well, that was kind of heavy,” said Izzard as he followed Greer. “So now we’re all feeling s***.” For the most part, comedy and torture were left to go their separate ways.

Funnily enough, though, the event slightly suffered as a result. Pretty much everyone went down well: Alan Carr proved what a fine live stand-up he is; the Australian musical comic Tim Minchin stormed it with two conspicuously clever, hugely effective songs; Mitchell and Webb reprised their brilliant Nazi sketch; Matt Horne and James Corden made a double-act debut that was short on material but big on energy; Geordie Sarah Millican jumped into the big league with a dazzling set, as did Anglo-Iranian Shappi Khorsandi, who came to Britain in 1979 because her satirist dad had to flee the authorities. Her routine was the kind of tightly packed set that could happily be exhibited in stand-up comedy museums in years to come.

And yet, without more bespoke routines, it did start to feel like a bit of a comedy museum. With no compere, apart from Mike Fenton Stevens’s dry voiceover man, and only a few sketches, this felt like a great benefit show that lacked the character you want from a Secret Policeman’s Ball. And when an act made a rare nod to the liveness of the event, such as Sean Lock’s response to a whistle from the crowd - “I’m being heckled by a Clanger” - you realised how much it was all geared to the cameras.

The 90-minute televised version, unseen at time of writing, should obliterate most of these reservations. Hopefully Razorlight’s songs will have been zapped in the edit - but perhaps they’re too famous to tamper with. Act by act, this was the strongest ball that Amnesty has thrown. But somehow, in slicking it up and cutting out the awkward bits, a bit of the event’s soul got lost as well.

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