"On October 13 2001 I was looking in my microscope in the lab and come Monday I was diving off the stage singing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Jerry St Clair off his tits on Co-codomol. It was as simple as that really."

A biomedical scientist turned standup comedian ("These two corpuscles walked into a bar..."), Dave Spikey is best known for playing Jerry "The Saint" St Clair, the naff Northern club compere in Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights.

It was this award-winning, downbeat sitcom which rescued him full-time from the apparently enviable position of Chief Biomedical Scientist in Haematology at The Royal Bolton Hospital, where the only humour was of a decidedly black nature and largely came in the form of a game called "Guess What's In The Bucket?"

But Spikey, a fan ever since his dad first tuned into Round The Horne, had always pursued a comedy career, working in the labs during the day, playing the clubs at night and at one point forming half of the double act Spikey and Sykey, who appeared on the TV show New Faces and finished a close third to a whippet juggler and a Latvian plumber who played I've Got Sixpence on a radiator.

So when his stint as the "compere without compare" drew to a close, Spikey returned to stand-up with 2003's Overnight Success Tour.

And though he's currently captaining Channel 4's quiz show Eight Out of Ten Cats and working on two television projects (Magnolia, a comedy drama about a small firm of painters and decorators, and Footballers' Lives, a spoof documentary about a Sunday league football team), he's still got enough surplus material for a second solo show, this time entitled (and with no apparent irony this time) Living The Dream.

"I don't buy into that mainstream or alternative comedian thing," says Spikey. "'Cos if you've seen something funny, chances are everybody at some stage will have noticed it. All you've got to do as a comedian is what you do anyway in the pub, when you tell a simple story and start exaggerating."

Veering from crude observations to cosy nostalgia in a way which does indeed resemble the patterns of pub conversation, Spikey's currently talking about everything from making "shit samosas" out of toilet roll in Greece to hating maths at school.

"It was that whole thing of, 'If it takes three men with one bucket two days to fill a bath,' " he laughs, "and you were just thinking, 'Why don't they just turn the bloody taps on?' Or, 'A swimming pool is 25 yards by three metres, you have two planks, one is eight foot long one is 16 metres long, how do you arrange them to get them in the bath'.

Eh? What are you playing at?"

An unpretentious talent whose jokes play on familiarity rather than surprise, Spikey, with his strong northern accent and rather old-school stage presence, is not a million miles from his considerably more small-time alter-ego.

In fact Jerry St Clair has even been known to make an appearance.

"I owe so much to Jerry and I know there's people who come to see me just because of him," says Spikey. "So I do bring him on for the encore. I p****d myself laughing the other night when everyone joined in with Corned Beef.

"You get 1,000 people singing, 'With chips or with salad, even Buckingham Palace...' And there'll be half a dozen people in the audience who never saw Phoenix Nights just going, 'Why's everybody singing about corned beef?"

Starts at 9.30pm. Tickets cost £15, call 01273 709709.

The DVD Living The Dream is out on November 7