Q: Have you gigged much in Leicester? A: I've mainly played the Leicester comedy festival. This year I performed my Little Howard Appeal Show twice and compared a stand-up show as well. I always like playing Leicester. Because it has a comedy festival the locals are pretty comedy savvy. Q: How were your recent Comedy Festival shows? A: They were great fun. Both of my solo shows sold well and we got a really good audience reaction. My favorite of the two was at Bambu, because it was a nice, intimate venue and the crowd were great. I also compared the Big Value Comedy Show at The Musician and that was mental. It was a late night show and I think most of the audience had been at the Absinth or something. Maybe it was a full moon, they were fun, but really weird. Q: How did you get into Stand Up? A: I fell. I was up at the Edinburgh festival with some friends of mine who were in a play and a friend of mine said he was doing a slot at a late night cabaret show. I said I'd give it a go as well, and it turned out I was quite good at it. I thought I'd give it a go and did more gigs when I moved to London and they all went very well as too. If they hadn't I'd never have carried on. So I thought I'd try to make a living at it and it worked! And I've never looked back, accept to find out where I dropped my money. Q: Who are your favourite current comedians? A: Josie Long is brilliant. Stewart Lee is hilarious, but a little bit evil. On telly Vic and Bob still make me really laugh, but they haven't been up to much lately. Q: How did your Perrier Nomination in 2003 affect your career? A: It really helped. I got to perform my show all over the world in Melbourne, New York, Aspen, Stockholm. I went on telly in Australia and got on the Tonight Show in the US (if only for twenty seconds). It also tricked a lot of people who didn't think I was funny into booking me. I was the only British nominee so it gave me a good 15 to 20 minutes of fame. Sometimes it's a hindrance. When you get introduced as a Perrier Nominee some crowds think, "well he better be bloody funny then" and it makes it quite hard work. Other than that it's been great. Q: You regularly appear at Robin Ince's Book Club. What sort of stuff do you normally contribute? A: I do, and it's brilliant. We're touring it at the moment and it's going down very well (apart from in Hemel Hempstead, they were very confused). My usual contribution is that I play songs on the Ukulele that I've written. A couple of times I've written a song with Josie Long, who is another Book Club regular. It's nice to do something different from my normal stand-up act and from my Little Howard shows, and that's what Book Club is all about; letting performers experiment a bit. Q: If there were no limits to what you could achieve, where would you like to be in ten years time? A: I'd like to be an English Matt Groening, with a personal chef and a cloak made of bees. | 
