Frank Skinner ponders 30 Years of Dirt - dates in Guildford, Southampton, Eastbourne and Brighton

Dates on tour include: Thursday, September 26 at Guildford, G Live; Tuesday, October 1 at Southampton, Mayflower; Thursday, October 17 at Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre; and Saturday, November 2 at Brighton Dome.

“It's a little bit more than 30 years now to be honest and that's not a bad innings for a stand-up comic. And I think my reputation, and it is reasonably founded, is that I'm quite a dirty comedian. And I've never managed to eradicate that. I start a show and when I am trying it out and refining it, the audience is my editor and it starts off clean and then steadily the audience remove the clean stuff. Everything is really a product of its environment. There was someone saying, wasn't there, that if Shakespeare hadn't written Shakespeare's plays, then his era would have done.

“But I'm a great lover of dirty jokes. Certainly at school and in the pub and at the factory in the West Midlands that was how we communicated with each other. When I moved to London people were a bit more sophisticated. But there is a reason that people really whoop at a good dirty joke but you've got to add more. You don't want to eat a meal that is just meat. You want vegetables and mashed potatoes. And the vegetables and mashed potatoes are my cleaner stuff. I think it's important to have the mix.

“My first gig was December 87 and it was a while before I started making a living from it. That wasn’t until 1989 when I quit my day job but when I started doing comedy and when I moved to London people wouldn’t be laughing at the same stuff that they were laughing at in the pub. There was a lot of political stuff going on and that's not what I do. What I want above all is a laugh. I don't want applause and lots of people were getting applause rather than laughs. What I want to do is finely craft some adult comedy. I've never really gone down the political route and it's great that people do. But I was always more musical hall rather than the political stuff, but it is good that there are all sorts of different strands.”

These days the predominant strand is stand-up – and that's partly because there is the chance to workshops things in a friendly and supportive environment these days rather than facing monsters in a pub, Frank says. “And yes, I have had my horrors. The first gig I did was really just mainly silence and the second gig was on New Year's Eve which I realised now was an error. They were giving small plastic trumpets to the audience to herald the New Year but really they just used them to get me off the stage! You meet comics like John Bishop and Steve Coogan and it seems that their first gig they just hit the round ground running, but basically I had to crawl through glass. When I start a new show and do new material in a little room somewhere, doing stuff I've never done before, you know it is possible that it might not get a laugh but usually it's more like a terrible traffic jam where you move forward a little bit and then you stop. But luckily I've never had one that's gone completely terribly.”

Inevitably Frank’s stand-up has changed over the years: “My stand-up is essentially a diary. It is autobiographical because I'm not very good at making stuff up otherwise I would be writing novels and so on. But basically it's me talking about my life, and rather than my stand-up changing I would say that it's my life that's changed so that my stand-up has changed in turn. When I first got into comedy I lived quite a wild lifestyle. I can't really say that I do that now!”