Everybody Loves Raymond and Somebody Feed Phil star Phil Rosenthal in Brighton

Award-winning author and producer Phil Rosenthal is on the road with An Evening With Phil Rosenthal with dates including Brighton Dome on April 3. It’s a tour which will certainly help confirm his positive view of human nature.

“It is my second tour and I'm so delighted that they wanted me back. People ask me what I do and I joke that I come on stage, eat a sandwich and then leave but I actually start off with a reel from the show and then I come on with the moderator. I like to talk to someone. It is just easier that way, and hopefully people will find it funny when I talk about the stories from my life and my career and all the-behind-the-scenes shenanigans. And that's just the first half and then the second-half is a Q&A with the audience and I absolutely love that because it changes significantly every night depending on who is asking the questions. The questions are always surprising. I'm so lucky that I seem to get a very wide demographic from little children to old people and everyone in between. The questions are always different.

“Really the idea for doing this theatre tour started when I started doing appearances at bookstores when I released the companion book to the show Somebody Feed Phil, a book with stories as well as recipes that people have been asking for. And there were always questions and I just loved doing it so I did the US tour then the European tour and then the Australia and New Zealand tour and now it's a part of my life that I love just as much as doing Somebody Feed Phil. I get to see all these different places.

“I get some great people coming along. I guess it is people that understand the show and I suppose I attract people of a certain type of sensibility, and I think it just shows that if you put nice out into the world, you get nice back.”

And that’s what Somebody Feed Phil is all about too: “I use the food and my stupid sense of humour to get the real message of the show out there which is that the world becomes a little bit better if we can experience a little bit of what other people's experiences are. That's the real point. I'm using food to connect to other people around the world. I see the food as the great connector and then the laughter is the great cement. The reason that I talk about food is because it's the great universal. We all eat and when we've all had something nice to eat we don't want to hurt each other and when we've all had something nice to eat then we're all in a good mood!”

And the lovely thing is that the show has created a great optimism in Phil which the show's continued success compounds: “I have become optimistic from going out there and meeting other people. When we sit in our in silos and just listen to the news that we want to see, we become disconnected from humanity. We are being fed lies and misanthropy and ‘this side is terrible’ and so on but that's not the case. When I visited Israel I was taken to a town where the Jews and the Arabs live side by side. The synagogue is next to the mosque. But does that make the news? No, it doesn't!”

But with the show Someone Feed Phil, Phil likes to think he is offering a tiny bit of the antidote: “But the real heroes are the people who really do go out there and strive to create a better place for us all.”