KITTY Flanagan is the first to admit she didn't quite get the idea of stand-up comedy straight away. She never frequented comedy clubs in her home town of Sydney, and made only the briefest of reconnaissance missions before her first time on stage, so it perhaps wasn't surprising that she got the wrong end of the stick.

"I thought I would try it once, and it went well, so I did it again, and it went well, but the third time it went really badly," she says. "I took it really personally, and thought they all hated me.

"After the gig, someone took me aside and said: 'You know the five minutes you did the first time? You are allowed to do that again. It's called a set.' I didn't know. I thought you had to have different stuff every time. That's when I realised it was called a set for a reason."

She had been an advertising copywriter but turned to stand-up when she was sacked - "Why would you do it if you had a proper job?", she says - and, while an acting career also appealed, the idea of spending three years at acting school didn't. But, the urge to try comedy had been far from lurking in the back of her mind.

"It just came out of the blue. I was watching a Billy Connolly video and I just thought he looked like he was having the best fun ever. That was probably the first time I thought I would give it a go.

"I hadn't been a comedy fan. I had seen Billy Connolly and Ben Elton live, and I enjoyed comedy on television, but I had never been on the live scene in Sydney. Even when I decided I was going to do it, I just went in and didn't check it out beforehand."

She hadn't been doing stand-up for long before she was picked up for a television sketch show, but two years later she went back to live performing. She moved over to London last summer, lured by the greater opportunities for live performing, and is a regular at Soho's Comedy Store. And tomorrow, she will be appearing alongside Simon Bligh and Patrice O'Neal in the first in a series of Comedy Store gigs at Durham's Gala Theatre.

"The beauty of doing sketches is that you can have another go, but with stand-up you get an instant reaction. I need that constant fix. I'm a junkie for stand-up."

* The Comedy Store presents Simon Bligh, Kitty Flanagan and Patrice O'Neil at the Gala Theatre, Durham, tomorrow, 8pm. Box Office: 0191 332 4041.