There are worse ways to start a wet Thursday morning than chatting with the lovely Dave Spikey about memories of childhood holidays.

He's starting his UK tour in Morecambe and, he tells me, the old amusement park no longer exists.

"Frontierland has been flattened!" he cries. "Do you remember the Cat and Mouse ride? It was ancient, you'd hear it splintering as you went up. Maintenance men pulled big chunks off it and threw them aside, whether they served a vital purpose or not.

"And do you remember the galleon on the sea front? I keep asking people about this and nobody remembers it!"

I don't recall the galleon but I do remember, as a child, enjoying endless rides on the Cat and Mouse at Frontierland. It's a shame it's no longer there.

"You should leave some flowers where it used to be," I suggest.

"I'll buy a wreath," says Dave.

The Bolton comic, best known as weary old-school stand-up Jerry St Clair in Phoenix Nights, is returning to the live circuit after various TV projects. He wrote and starred in ITV sitcom Dead Man Weds, about a sleepy provincial newspaper, and wrote Magnolia, a BBC1 comedy drama about ex-cons running a painting and decorating business.

"To be honest that didn't really work out the way I wanted," he says. "I kept going: That's not the way it was meant to be'"

The critics praised Dead Man Weds - will there be another series of that? "Who knows?" sighs Dave. "I could get another series out of it, but they put us against Desperate Housewives which hammered us in the ratings.

"I've got a couple of projects in development but this business is a minefield in terms of getting stuff off the ground. I've written a film called Footballers' Lives about a Sunday league football team and we got as far as casting it but it all went quiet. And I've written a comedy drama called Sour Grapes about a group of blokes made redundant who accidentally buy a vineyard. They get drunk, go on eBay and buy what they think is a case of wine for £2,000 - turns out to be a vineyard for £200,000."

After the highs and lows of TV, Dave is pleased to be back doing stand-up. The tour is called Laughter Is The Best Medicine, a nod to his former career as chief biomedical scientist in haematology at the Royal Bolton Hospital. His show's due in Bradford next month.

"I started off directing hospital am-dram shows," he says. "I got some observational material from hospital - who can resist a sign saying Family planning, rear entrance'? - but my main influences were from growing up.

"We didn't have a telly till I was ten so I listened to radio comedy, things like Round the Horne which had no pay-off at the end but was just funny in itself, with wonderful voices and characters. I grew to love the way language was used."

Dave started playing clubs and won North West Comedian of the Year. When he compered the contest two years later it was won by a Bolton lad called Peter Kay. The pair started writing together, creating TV comedies Mad for the A6, The Services and That Peter Kay Thing before Phoenix Nights struck comedy gold. It wasn't until he won his first British Comedy Award that Dave gave up the day job.

Now a double Comedy Award winner, his hit live shows have established him as a solo star, and he says he owes Jerry St Clair "a massive debt."

"But the time came to let Jerry go, he's working in a bar in Majorca now," he smiles.

So what can we expect from the new tour? "I don't get personal; I don't attack the Royals or anything like that because they can't defend themselves," he says.

"There's some political material - a bit of global warming, you've got to have that, and some NHS stuff. I talk about things people may recognise, like making sugar sandwiches as a kid.

"And the time I got £1 for my dinner money and spent 5p on scraps at the chippie then 95p on Mr Freeze ice pops. Only I put them in my inside pocket and by the time I got back to school I was flat-lining.

"Then there's my mate who I went to the MEN Arena with recently. We took the wives and made a night of it, staying in a posh hotel. I wound my mate up, telling him you had to pay for tap water, as nothing was free in places like that. He looked mortified - I ran a bath earlier,' he said. How much is that going to cost me?'"

Part of Dave's appeal is that he sends up Northern life, but with affection.

"It's not something deliberate, but I am from the North, that's who I am. We don't call a London comic's act very Southern'," he says.

Recently he visited China to witness the horrors of bear bile farms. He's involved with a campaign urging the Chinese government, in the year of the Beijing Olympics, to outlaw the practice.

"Bile farms are worse than you can imagine," says Dave. "It's presumptuous to say to another country, Your ways are wrong', but it seems ludicrous to keep these magnificent creatures in tiny cages, with needles sticking into them for 20 years, just for traditional medicine, when there are synthetic alternatives.

"Nothing prepares you for the sight of caged bears, self-mutilating in endless pain.

"On the plus side, we rescued a bear and got it into a sanctuary. I'm hoping to make a documentary about it. No living creature should suffer like that."

  • Dave Spikey is at St George's Hall on February 15 (ring 01274 432000); the Grand Opera House, York, on April 6 (ring 0844 8472322); and Harrogate International Centre on May 22 (ring 0845 1308840).