A HUNDRED yards from busy London Bridge station in London, Ross Lee is about to chop off a young child’s head.

Or at least, that is what it looks like. The boy has been placed under the guillotine, his neck under the blade. Above him towers his executioner, menacingly smirking and cracking jokes as he prepares to do the deed. Moments later, it is all over and, of course, and the child escapes unscathed. It is all a trick, but a clever one.

Dressed in black and made-up to scare, the executioner cackles as he releases the boy. Ross Lee, from Pudsey, is the actor operating the grisly mechanism.

With quick wit and stage presence, he has no problem drawing a crowd to the spectacle, at the London Bridge Experience - an interactive journey through London’s unsavoury past - but then he has spent a lifetime in macabre, comic, off-the-wall entertainments.

He started out in 1994 on a Channel Four show called Surf Potatoes with Dani Behr and Max Beesley. “I was a TV terrorist and got a very bad name for gatecrashing other people’s TV shows,” he laughs,”

In 1996, he was “miscast” as the host of a local TV ‘what’s on’ guide called Premiere, for Central Television. “They wanted a light and bouncy presenter and I presented it like an early 1970s, drunk Alice Cooper.”

He adds: “I still have absolutely no idea how I lasted three series until I was told that I was being replaced by a rubber replica of myself, that, due to contractual agreements, I had to operate.”

In 2009 he co-hosted the Kids’ Choice Awards and went on to present the horror-themed Nickleodeon show Ross Lees Ghoulies, which received a Bafta nomination for best writing.

“I always wanted to start a TV show by bursting onto the stage in a ghost train,” he says. “This was made a reality for Ross Lee’s Ghoulies. The track was only eight feet long and lasted five seconds.”

This was followed by his own cult hidden camera BBC 3 show The Pranker, in 2011. He also presented Chute! on CBBC where Lee played a version of himself trapped in a rubbish tip.

“Weirdly I’m getting recognised a lot more now, by Chute! fans, who are now late teens and have fond memories of watching me lose my mind on kids’ TV”

Ross went to Priesthorpe School in Pudsey. “I was there in body, though my head was usually somewhere else. I was the boy in class that was often rudely awoken up by a high velocity chalkboard eraser.”

He loved “all the arty stuff, but hated sports. I feared and loathed football and for some reason they’d always stick me in the goal.”

“I figured this was unfair considering I weighed as much as an empty packet of crisps. These screaming louts would run at me, dribbling a mud football that could quite easily kill me and they’d expect me to chuck myself in front of it? One day, for revenge, I placed a rubber frog inside my football shorts so that when the ball came, I would just stand rigid on the spot, let the ball slide into the back of the net, then shake my left leg and let the frog drop out. The frog bounced, there was a long silence, and Mr Hardaker said, ‘Eeh, yer a funny one, Ross lad.’

“My overly gruesome illustrations in history class used to raise an eyebrow or too also. My depiction of King Harold getting shot in the eye by an arrow had received a question mark rather than a tick. It was good though. It took over three pages and used up an entire red Berol pen.”

His love for horror surfaced the moment he watched Dr David Banner lose his temper and transform into the Incredible Hulk on TV. "I had no idea what was going on. There, stood a puny man in the rain, getting so angry that his eyes turn white and he morphs into a green monster. And it's thundering and lightning."

He adds: "My love for the macabre was further fuelled after my Grandma gave me a ‘horror box’ one Christmas. She’d made the box herself, being a talented artist, and filled it with little gruesome bits from Whitby joke shop. I remember vividly. There was a little rubber heart, a little chopped off hand, some fake cat poo and a plastic tub of horror slime. I had fun playing with these strange presents, along to the soundtrack of the BBC Death and Horror sound effects cassettes.”

Despite working in London he did not move there until 2004, to further his ambitions of being “a horror rock god.”

He joined the London Bridge Experience in May. “It’s been great fun. I’ve named the guillotine ‘Mr Choppy’ and we’ve become very attached.”

“I also couldn’t survive without my amazing girlfriend of four years, Zoe who has many times stopped me from going mad. Or if I ‘have’ gone mad, she’ll remind me of who I am.”

He loves coming home to Yorkshire. “I’m definitely making more trips up to Bradford in 2017. I started writing a rock n’ roll album in 1995 with my friend Chris Sharp from Shipley, and it would be nice to finally get that finished.

“My amazing Aunty Sandra lives in Greengates and I look and act like her. Me, Sandra and dad go to the Oxford Bingo Club, we’ve been going for years. I love it. Mum isn't a fan."

He adds: "Going home to get spoilt my wonderful parents is the best thing in the world and I don’t manage it enough. None of my incredible adventure would have been possible without them.”

Christmas sees him supporting at a sell-out show in Brighton, and then playing an African coffee shop in Brixton the week after. “I’d also like to do a graveyard tour - do you think that would be acceptable? I’ve also just unleashed a cartoon onto the web called Mr Bum - it's better than it sounds!”

He has “only just got excited about YouTube." “ I’m a bit late coming to the table, but wow. I’ll be making a lot of things next year.”

As for the distant future: "The end of this adventure will see me lowered down from the 02 Arena, emerging from a papier mache’ egg. Preferably in front of an audience, but I don’t really mind."