Andy Parsons hits the road and goes it alone

10:19pm Thursday 31st January 2008

BBC2 Mock the Week and QI comic Andy Parsons is swapping the small screen for the country's stages.

Andy is like Bill Bailey but without the hair front and back and like Bill, he is very droll.

It will be his eighth solo tour since 1998, but his first national one. Before that, he teamed up with Henry Naylor who co-wrote nine series of Parsons and Naylor's Pull-Out Sections for BBC Radio 2.

"I like the live stuff because no one else is responsible. Things happen live that you can't recreate. No matter how good your material is, the best stuff comes out of the audience," he said.

Travelling to gigs is a pain, but he likes being at different theatres. He has performed in Leeds before, but not Skipton. The Mart Theatre may come as a bit of a surprise, but as he's coming down from the Lake District he'll have plenty of countryside to enjoy.

Born in 1967, Andy is a Cambridge University law graduate and sometime Glasgow shipyard worker - he went up there on legal research for a year, but after six months he was given three months pay to leave.

"I used that to get into radio," he said. Yes, but how?

"There was a show called Weekending on Radio 4. They had commissioned writers and non-commissioned writers. Non-commissioned writers went to the BBC an hour before the commissioned writers and did their 30 seconds for the producers.

"It was a motley crew. There were people who hadn't had a bath for weeks or had the biggest beard I've seen in my life. Producers didn't enjoy it but it was part of the BBC's access policy."

That's how he got his break and made the most of it and now he's hardly off radio or television. But is it any easier for unknown comedy writers to get such an opportunity?

"I think it's harder. The BBC thinks it's one of their duties to give writers an opportunity, but producers want to work with established writers who will give them what they want," he added.

He's been in the business one way or another since the early Nineties. He is more confident, more assured, as a performer than he used to be and he's branching out more as a solo performer.

For example, he has written a sitcom for Radio 4 called The Lost Blog of Scrooby Trevithic, six half-hour episodes due to be broadcast in June.

"They took me about a month to write. It takes a certain discipline to sit down and not watch the telly. But it was something I wanted to do. It's all good fun with cameo parts for various friends," he said.

In 2002, he was winner of the Time Out Best Comedy Award. In 2004, he won the New Zealand Comedy Guild Best International Act. Two years later, he won the Montreal Comedy Festival's The Best Comedy Showdown.

I daresay he'll pick up a few more glittering prizes before he turns his hand to something else.

• Andy Parsons is on at Skipton's Mart Theatre on February 28 (box office: 01756 791411); Leeds City Varieties on April 1 (box office: 08456 441881); and Huddersfield's Lawrence Batley Theatre on May 7 (box office: 01484 430528).

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