The comedian puts into words the things he finds amusing – happy in the knowledge that his audiences are seeing the funny side too. Steve Pratt reports.

WHEN David Spikey switched careers from working in a medical laboratory to comedy, he was following his father’s example.

“He worked as a painter and decorator and decided he’d missed the boat,”says the performer and writer, who first caught the public eye as cabaret star Jerry St Clair in TV’s Phoenix Nights, which he co-wrote with Peter Kay and Neil Fitzmaurice.

“I just happened to be along for the ride and was surrounded by literature and art and music. He used to write short stories and poems. It was a brilliant childhood.

“He changed careers and became a psychiatric nurse, then a social worker. He taught me to be a ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ sort of person. You’ve got to take those opportunities if they come along.”

His 2011 tour, Words Don’t Come Easy, reflects his love of the England language – and his dislike of the abuse of it. Newspapers, it must be admitted, figure in the latter aspect.

He loves comedy tours, so much so that as soon as he finishes one he starts planning another. “I usually have a year in between. I take all the stuff I have in the drawer and try to make sense of it.

There’s a bit of panicking that I haven’t got a two-hour show, then I do warm-ups just to tie it all up. It evolves,” he explains.

The show examines life’s situations where words, as the title says, don’t come easily – such as parents explaining the facts of life, ridiculous newspaper stories, hospital speak and song lyrics “that range from the lazy through surreal to the ridiculous”.

The core of the show is the same every night, but it’s also different every night. “It’s just consistently fine-tuning and keeping it fresh for me, so that I’m on top of it,” says Spikey. “It wouldn’t be good if you did the same two hours every night in the same order.”

Adrenalin takes over when he steps on stage. And he has the knowledge that now he has a degree of fame he’s in a position where people have come to see him rather than being just one act in the show or part of a corporate event.

“Everyone has come to have a laugh,” he says – and that’s what they get, although cruelty is out. “I’m not a very edgy comedian. I don’t do anything I think is cruel.

But I do adult things. It’s quite cheeky, but never cruel.”

The audience make-up has changed over the years. Where once it was Phoenix Nights viewers and a “quite young end” audience, now he has students and next to them, their grandparents.

He’s even getting the Countdown crowd after half a dozen appearances on the C4 words-and-numbers quiz show.

Growing up, he listened to radio comedy, especially lunchtime shows such as Round The Horne and The Clitheroe Kid. When the family finally got a TV, Morecambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper made him laugh. Not that he models himself on anyone in particular. “I am just me, really,” he says. “My influences early on were club comedians who, in between songs, started telling stories about their lives.”

So how would he describe what he does? “I’m not very challenging, I’m being myself. My skill, my art if I have one, is that we all see the same things, whether it’s in the street, television, music and it’s my job to exaggerate and see from a slightly different angle. To make the story bigger and bigger so you have immediate recognition.

It’s the comedy of accessiblity, so people understand what you’re talking about.”

The first leg of the tour is exclusively Northern, I note. “That’s done because I want to get home at night.

While the show is fresh in my mind I get home and go through it like homework.”

Off stage, Spikey is working with a young writer on a script that he feels has potential and is producing a short film to test the water. He’s already produced his own work on TV in the comedy-dramas Dead Man Weds and Magnolia and now feels he’s reached the stage where he should help new talent.

“He’s a young lad, unemployed, who deserves a bit of a leg up.

I’m enjoying working with him. I think it will work. He writes about his life in Cumbria.

A lot of the stuff you see on television is set elsewhere and it’s interesting to see somewhere different.”

• Dave Spikey Tour 2011 – Words Don’t Come Easy: York Grand Opera House, April 9. Tickets 0844-8472322 and online from grandoperahouseyork.org.uk