"The idea is to turn up with no prejudices," says David Bramwell "So you have no idea what the subjects will be until you're sat down with your drink and I get up on the podium and say, 'Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we've got talks on crocodiles, Freddie Mercury and beetroot.'"

Last summer, Bramwell (of The Cheeky Guide) announced his decision to introduce into Brighton something akin to a French salon, a debating society and a gentlemen's club.

It would be called Catalyst Club, playing host to three 15-minute talks every month, and it would be a place at which to voice passions, share ideas and revive the forgotten arts of speaking and listening.

It couldn't have been a bigger success. With a mailing list which extends "into some very odd parts of the country" and a constant influx of new speakers, Catalyst Club has so far played host to 36 talks, subjects ranging from zombies (including a costumed appearance by an extra from Shaun Of The Dead) and chewing gum ("he had some very poignant things to say"), to Sod's Law ("the guy tried to demonstrate it by getting the audience to drop slices of buttered toast - most of them landed butter-side-up, thereby proving that what can go wrong will.")

Now Bramwell, while anxious to keep it "grass roots", is planning to invite along occasional celebrity speakers. And for the first Catalyst Club Special, he has the very wonderful Ken Campbell - the raconteur, comedian, actor and director who founded the Liverpool Theatre of Science Fiction, directed the world's longest play and toured the world with a Pigeon translation of Macbeth, yet remains best known for his appearances in Fawlty Towers and In Sickness And In Health. He will be talking about either acting or time travel.

"Ken was the perfect starting point because he's a great monologist and has lots of very unusual interests," explains Bramwell. "Time travel is a big passion of his because he has worked quite closely with a spiritual community in Italy called Damanhur. For the past 25 years that they've existed, everything they've claimed they will do - pretty big stuff such as building a temple the size of St Paul's Cathedral inside a mountain - they've accomplished.

And now they claim to have built a fully-functioning time machine.

"So Ken has got very interested in this and he has even introduced these people to the world's leading astrophysicist to try to suss out the truth of it. The guy was pretty impressed. He said, 'Well, they're very intelligent people Ken, there's about a 30 per cent chance they actually have built a time machine.'"

From the Haywards Heath resident who delivered a workshop in Barbershop Quartet singing to the 81-year-old philosopher who held the audience spellbound with a talk entitled The Universe As A Single Living Organism, Catalyst Club has thrived on the speakers' enthusiasm for the esoteric.

And Bramwell, who emphasises the amount of thought and effort they put in, has consistently been inspired to read books, listen to records or taste products of which he'd never previously heard.

But there is, he says, one talk he's still waiting on.

"A guy came up to me one night and said, 'I want to come and talk about rocket'," laughs Bramwell. "I said, 'Rockets? Great,' and he said, 'No, rocket. I've got some great stories about that herb'. I tell you, I won't stop Catalyst Club until I've heard that guy talk for 15 minutes about rocket."