Wallsend’s Gavin Webster talks to Will Scott about trying to retain his integrity as a comedian and why he’s proud of his limited exposure on TV.

ALEXEI Sayle once remarked how he lamented the fact that Michael Angelo and Leonardo Da Vinci were dead, yet the carpenter and painter, who made a pig’s ear of his kitchen at home, still lived?

If you apply a similar logic to comedians, well, not the dead or alive analogy of course, but in another way – why do certain comedians enjoy huge popularity and acclaim while other more deserving funny men and women do not?

For instance, why do the likes of Michael McIntyre and Jim Davidson command a huge nationwide following, when they're as funny as gout, while Gavin Webster does not get the acknowledgement his talent merits outside of the loyal fan base in his native North-East, when he could arguably reduce a rampaging rhinoceros to tears of laughter?

The phenomenon probably lies with the Wallsend-based wit himself.

“Well that’s probably because I still have a punk ethic about me,” reveals Webster, once a regular team captain on Channel 4’s game show Does Doug Know? “Don’t get me wrong I would like a bigger audience and of course the money would be nice. But some things are just not worth it.

“I was proud of getting on mainstream telly after nine years of hard graft when it happened. I was also proud of getting in to the psyche of the top brass at Channel 4 while living in Newcastle and not in London. But the whole London set involves constantly going to the right parties, associating with the right people, kissing backsides and generally being Jimmy Carr. But I wasn’t playing.

“Next morning after doing the show (Does Doug Know), I was on the train home or going off somewhere else to do a gig. Sometimes I would be off doing a gig the same night.

“I’m not proud of the show though.

I thought Tony Law was brilliant, but most people were just treading water, the most influential of which came out okay in the edit.”

Webster has done other TV work such as the Regionnaires, a regional panel show with Simon Donald, from the Viz comic, and the Comedy Store on Paramount. But ask the Geordie comic about his TV career and he says: “I don’t do just any telly. I’m more proud of the fact that I’ve never done any of those awful Do you remember 1987 or I Love Last Week kind of shows.

“The dreadful Gina Yashere seems to be on every single one of those shows, as well as a host of other no marks that claim to distinctly remember what colour shoes the bloke from Erasure was wearing on Top Of The Pops that night 18 years ago, when in reality, they’ve just seen the clip a second ago. Doing a show like that is just as much selling your soul as doing an advert, despite what Bill Hicks said.”

It’s quite refreshing in the current cultural X Factor climate of “I want to be famous at any cost”, that a performer is unwilling enter into some Faustian pact with a modern day version of Beelzebub, probably Simon Cowell, for 15 minutes of Warholian fame.

In an ideal world, where the alternative is mainstream, and art wins over commercialism, McIntyre and Davidson would be house painters and Webster would be applying his art to the Sistine Chapel.

■ You can see what all the fuss is about when Webster performs his Howay The Laughs show, at The Live Theatre, Quayside, on May 27, 28 and 29. Tickets: £10 and £8. Box Office: live.org.uk or 0191-232-1232