DAVE Spikey’s new tour, Punchlines, does what it says on the tin.

“We all love a good punchline,” says the Bolton comic. “‘Punch’ indicates that the ‘line’ should come as a surprise or shock, so I had this idea of examining the many types of punchlines and ways of delivering them. They’re not restricted solely to the pay-off to jokes are they? Any story, speech or monologue will have a punchline.

“Journalists often use a punchline as a headline. ‘Zip me up before you go-go’ and ‘Headless body found in topless bar’ are famous examples.”

Dave started out playing clubs while working as chief biomedical scientist in haematology at the Royal Bolton Hospital. Three decades of working in the NHS appears to have kept him grounded.

“I had 30-odd years working endless hours in a team helping to save people’s lives, working through long winter nights cross-matching blood, checking patients’ cell counts and blood coagulation status and no-one ever popped their head in the lab and said ‘Hey Dave, well done on last night mate, cracking stuff’,” says Dave.

“I used to write comedy as a hobby. My father was a great comedy fan and we’d listen to it on the radio and eventually on TV so I grew up surrounded by laughs and competing with my dad as to who could come up with the funniest lines.

“I was asked to write revues by the hospital am-dram society, and directed and appeared in them. A friend had a band and asked me to support them on a small tour. I wrote a few two-handed sketches and me and my mate Rick Sykes formed a double act, Spikey and Sykey. All went well until he left to pursue a teaching career and I packed it in and went back to looking down my microscope. Some days I even turned it on.

“But I’d got the bug and a couple of years later started out on my own. After ten years hard slog on the circuit I’d become an overnight success!”

Two years after Dave won the North West Comedian of the Year, the title was handed to another Bolton native, Peter Kay. The pair started writing together, creating several TV comedies before Phoenix Nights, in which Dave played jaded old-school comic Jerry St Clair.

He had another hit with ITV sitcom Dead Man Weds, which he wrote and starred in, but stand-up remains closest to his heart.

“It’s the immediacy and intimacy,” he says. “Writing for TV is rewarding but you write a great line and 12 months down the line it’s on telly and somebody in Halifax chuckles, maybe even laughs out loud a little, and says ‘Ha, that’s good’.”

He’s such a laidback chap. Does he use stand-up to vent his spleen on anything? “Screaming children whose parents make no effort to deal with them,” Dave replies. “In super-markets, they’re screaming and running round getting in your way. Children shouldn’t be in super-markets, they hate supermarkets. Here’s a tip – one parent go shopping, the other either stay at home and play with the kids or take them to the park.

“Screaming kids in pubs too. Pubs are sanctuary, keep kids out – put them on a chain outside with a bowl of water and a tray of fish fingers.”

Dave Spikey is at the Mart Theatre, Skipton, on November 21. Ring (01756) 709666.