Hugh Dennis talks about having fun with current affairs with stage partner Steve Punt.

WHEN is the news funny? That's the difficult judgement constantly facing actor, comedian, voice-over artist and writer Hugh Dennis, who is one half of the UK's TV, radio and stage act Punt and Dennis.

"Not much is happening at the moment apart from the release of the 15 hostages in Iraq but there's been a continuing story of a dentist who used his surgical instruments to clean his ears and has then done work on people's teeth. But that appeared about two weeks ago," says the 44-year-old who passes comic comment on current affairs on BBC Radio 4's The Now Show and BBC2's Mock The Week.

His task here and for the pair's latest Stuff And Nonsense stage tour, taking in Middlesbrough, York and Darlngton, is deciding if enough members of the audience will get the joke.

"Using the news headlines always means you have something to write about but it means you can't agonise... you've just got to write it. (On radio) My favourite headline recently was one which sounded like it came from medieval witch-burning times and said Virgin Takes Sky To Court and you think 'that's weird'. We also had a fantastic one in Bath once which provided about ten minutes of material. A newspaper poster said 'Bath's new bus lane - special report' at a time when we'd just gone to war in Iraq. I remember buying a newspaper because the Yorkshire Evening Post had a poster saying 'Rock Group Split' and it turned out to be Peters and Lee. You did feel slightly ripped off," he says.

"Someone will always get offended and you're sort of not doing your job if someone, somewhere isn't slightly taken aback," Hugh comments adding the thought that the comic's biggest problem is people who get offended on behalf of others who aren't offended.

Hugh and Steve moved on from being Jasper Carrott's support act to comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience which was broadcast on Radio and TV in 1989-90. He says: "In the very first week we got a letter saying 'I was shocked to the core having thought it was a programme about the life and times of Mary Whitehouse'." Despite the threat of having left luggage in Leicester while appearing in Glasgow, Hugh says he and Steve do look forward to touring. "We've done quite a lot of dates in the North-East previously and had nice times in Yarm," recalls Hugh who reveals he spent several years in Ripon linked to his father's Church of England duties. Dennis senior famously going on to be Bishop of Saint Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

Hugh's best story involving the North-East actually results from his university days which involved being interviewed at Durham before he chose St John's College, Cambridge.

"I was asked by the chaplain at the college whether I minded if there wasn't skirt on tap at Durham or would I go looking for it? I told him quite firmly that I would go looking for it," he jokes about one of the oddest questions asked of a prospective student.

He admits that people do have problems telling him and Steve Punt apart. "They sometimes shout out 'hello Steve' and I imagine they do the same with him. Well they would do because his name is Steve. We do have separate identities because we do different things as well," he says revealing that he's in another BBC sitcom this year having scored a hit as GP and arrogant twerp Piers Crispin in BBC1's My Hero.

Hugh is actually his middle name but came into use when registration for actors' union Equity revealed there was already a Peter Dennis.

"My agent wrote to them saying there was no chance of me being confused with the other Peter Dennis who was then in his Sixties. They wrote back saying in normal circumstances that's fine but you've got the small problem that the other Peter Dennis is the chairman of the Equity name change committee. So I then became Hugh apart from to my slightly deaf mother-in-law who thought I was Hugo for months."

The comedy duo are unlikely to appear together again on TV again, partly because they like the immediacy of creating radio shows which can be broadcast 24 hours later.

"We'd been constantly on TV for about six or seven years and we took a little break where we didn't work together for about 18 months and then re-discovered radio and then it was fantastic."