Did you always want to be a professional comedian? If no, what did you want to do/think you would end up doing?
I always wanted to be a writer really, writing fiction or comedy, and I did a lot of extra-curricular writing at school, but then I saw a stand-up comedian called Ted Chippington opening for The Fall at the Powerhaus in Birmingham in 1984 when I was 15 and that made me want to be a stand-up.

What would you say motivated you to try stand up for the first time?
Seeing Ted. I realised you didn’t have to be flash like Ben Elton or old-school like Bernard Manning or personable like Jasper Carrot. You could be harsh and bleak. You didn’t need material or a personality. You could just occupy space. It was an amazing moment, seeing Ted like that, for all sorts of reasons.

Which, if any, comedians inspired you?
Well, Ted Chippington, initially. Then I saw Oscar McLennan, who was really on the performance art wing of the early alternative comedy scene, at Warwick Arts Centre in 1985, lying on the floor to the sound of helicopter rotors, lit by one light. The first year I went to Edinburgh as a student in 1987 I saw a bill which was Arnold Brown, Arthur Smith, Jerry Sadowitza and Norman Lovett. When I was first in London I saw Kevin MacAleer. I can quite honestly say my stand-up was, and still is, heavilly in debt to those performers. I was lucky early on that the people I saw did things I imagined I could do, and wanted to do. The first two stand-ups I saw were Peter Richardson opening for Dexy’s in 1982 and Phil Jupitas opening for Billy Bragg in 1983, who were both good, but made it seem like something that wasn’t anything I could have done, being a character actor and a confident, likeable man respectively.

Where was your first gig? How did it go?
I did little things when I was at school or college. The first gigs of stand-up I did to adults were in the summer of 1989, the first at Newcastle Arts centre in a fringe preview show. It went fine.

Was there ever a point when you thought about giving up? If so, why? What kept you going?
I gave up stand-up from 2001-2004. I couldn’t seem to write anything new that I liked and was in a kind of rut. No-one was coming to gigs that I had out of London which were losing money. My then management Avalon had a strange live booker who kept sending me to places where no-one was expecting me, and booking me into places when he knew I wasn’t available. Things that I thought were positive choices on stage were reviewed as if they were mistakes. I lost more money in Edinburgh on an annual basis than I could afford to.

I started again in 2004. Working with Richard Thomas on Jerry Springer The Opera had inspired me. He is an inspirational, dogged figure. He also made me think there was something in being sincere about what you felt and believed in. One-note-cynicism is in the long run a creative dead end. Also, when JSTO went to the West End there were so many people interfering in it, and so many layers of control to get through to get an idea through, that it was very satisfying to go back to one man and a mic. In my time off the man of the moment, Ricky Gervais, had said I was his favorite stand-up so it was harder for critics who had lionised him to dismiss me as boring again, as a lot of what they liked a out him was in some ways inspired by me, I think. Anyway, things started to pick up after that and I am very grateful for his support.

What are your best and worst memories of your early career?
The bad memories become good ones in hindsight. Being bottled off in Bangor Uni, 1993. Seems heroic now.

What advice would you give to new comedians starting out on the circuit?
Avoid Jongleurs and the Comedy Store and try and find your own voice, rather than one that pleases all the people on Friday nights out. Check figures for budgets very carefully. Turn nearly everything down as a matter of course. Don’t get yourself in a position where money men have any say in anything you have created.

What, if anything, do you know now that you wish you knew when you started out?
That it was more cost effective to drive myself around 100-seaters with no overheads, than to go to empty 500-seaters in a tour bus with a tour manager and hotels.

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Extracts of this interview were featured in The Independent’s New Review in May 2009. Click here to see the piece which also features Mark Watson, Jon Richardson and Anna Crilly.