Rich Hall traverses the Atlantic like a latter-day David Frost, shaking off jet-lag like a dog just in from the rain.

Last week he was in America, filing reports for the Eleven O'Clock Show on Channel Four; the week before, it was Australia.

This weekend, however, he will pause in Yorkshire - not for long, but long enough at least to take in a Bradford curry and a film at Pictureville.

"I'm following in Bill Bryson's footsteps," he says, recalling the American travel writer who raved about the city's two most noteworthy attractions.

Hall is discreet enough not to mention that Bryson hated almost everything else about Bradford - but he is surprisingly less circumspect when it comes to his own work.

"I thought The Eleven O'Clock Show was really ****," he says bluntly.

The deadpan, Montana-born comic is well known for speaking his mind ("You little Hubble-telecoping freak," he once shouted at a woman in glasses in his audience) but one might have expected him to be more supportive of his own series.

Not for a moment.

"I don't think the show was at all what it was supposed to be -a daily report on what's going on in the world," he says. "To me, it completely missed the mark. It didn't have any real point of view."

Hall, who appears tonight at the City Varieties in Leeds, was hired by Channel Four to bring an American flavour to its three-times-a-week, late night comedy slot. He accepted, he says, because he was given a free hand to file whatever reports he wanted, from the US and Australia. But now he accuses the show of falling victim to the trend towards "new laddism".

"It's all these people who used to read GQ magazine: they're supposed to be evolved new men, but they're not. They just want to be laddish. They're a new marketing target, that's all."

Hall is a veteran among American comedians - and a practitioner of what he says is a dying art in America.

"The great thing about Britain is that stand-up comedy is still flourishing, unlike in the States. I think 90 per cent of all American comedians just want to get into a sitcom. They use stand-up as their calling card."

His current show, a big hit at last year's Edinburgh Festival, is half traditional, political stand-up, half character performance by his alter ego Otis Lee Crenshaw, a death row inmate from the American south with a keyboard synthesiser and a bourbon-soaked voice.

"A lot of the show has changed since Edinburgh," he says. "America has spiralled down even further since then."

Hall's background is in writing, not performing. He had wanted to write since watching comedy sketches on TV, performed by Sonny and Cher, Jackie Gleason and others, and scripted in many cases by a yet-to-be-discovered Steve Martin.

"He was a huge influence on me," he says. "When I was tripping around in university, he really caught on as a stand-up. He was the first one to take stand-up into stadiums. It was so different."

Hall became a writer on America's David Letterman Show, where much of his time was spent, he insists, "ordering free stuff - CDs and magazines, mostly".

He is at heart, a writer still, he says - and may return to it full-time in five years or so, "when I get all this stand-up out of my blood".

"But I don't think I've done my best show yet. One day I'll come off stage and think, 'That's it - I'm never going to top that one'. Then I may go off and write a film."

In the meantime, that Bradford curry and Pictureville beckons. "Is it right they only show Cinerama there once a month? I may just hang around."

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