It took just an hour on TV to wipe out seven years of work.

Almost since he had left school, Mark Jones from Swindon had been plying his trade in the stand-up comedy clubs of twilight Britain, sometimes performing twice a night, up to 400 times a year.

Eventually, he had graduated to headline status at London's Comedy Store, and carved out a niche for himself on entertainment's cutting edge.

A single appearance on The Word changed all that. "You - a stand-up?" people chided him. "Eddie Izzard's a stand-up; you're not."

It was, he says, a sobering experience. Television had railroaded Jones - his name now changed to Mark Lamarr and his hair Brylcreemed into its trademark quiff - and re-invented him as a "yoof" presenter. It's an image that persists to this day.

"At the time it really got to me," says Lamarr. "Suddenly, people were seeing me on TV without knowing that I was ever a stand-up, and it bothered me so much. God, it bugged me.

"Now I realise I was being petty. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether you're stood up or sat down, as long as people are laughing."

The Word, Channel Four's famously vulgar late-night entertainment of the early Nineties, gave Lamarr his first break on TV. But he was uncomfortable perched on its Day-Glo couch, pretending to be an interviewer.

"It was a show that conferred immediate celebrity status," he says, "but none of the presenters, except Katie Puckrick, was good enough to carry it off.

"It's terrifying to be under that much scrutiny and to be pretty awful. I really tried hard to be intelligent, but no matter how much you fought against it, it was still The Word."

The show all but submerged his comedian's credentials. And when, later, he graduated to sitting down on other shows - BBC2's Shooting Stars and the pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks - he found himself once again explaining to his new fans that he was actually a stand-up comic.

"People glimpse you briefly and make snap judgements. That's just the way it goes," he says.

Now, though, he's going back to his roots. He's about to embark upon a major stand-up tour of Britain, which brings him to Halifax in two weeks' time and to Leeds later in February.

"At the end of last year, I realised that stand-up was my job," he says. "And I thought, Why aren't I gigging? It was crazy.

"So now I'm getting the bit between my teeth again, and it's incredibly exciting. I never thought it would be, because I've been doing it for 15 years now. But I'm really riveted again by the thought of touring."

Lamarr is buoyed, too, by the success of his BBC2 solo series last year - his first standing-up - in which he conducted highly individual rants on aspects of popular culture which displeased him. It was, he thinks, the best thing he's done - no matter what anyone else says.

"I work really hard to do shows that I care about," he says. "I don't expect anyone else to care because they're my little babies.

"And whatever shows I've done, even the worst ones, have had my personality stamped all over them. After all, that's all I've got. I can't act, so all you're ever going to get is me."

Individuality is not, he acknowledges, the safest career path in comedy.

"I could have made a lot more money, became more famous and been liked by more people if I'd done more mainstream work - but I wouldn't have been comfortable doing it.

"I got asked to do the Des O'Connor Show once, but I didn't really think there was ever going to be a comfortable meeting of minds there. The only time Des was going to hug a cushion and fall over was if I pushed him. The fact is, I'm never going to be a mainstream ITV act, and I don't even think about it. I just want to do interesting work."

Lamarr is dismissive of many TV programmes, yet self-effacing about his own. He despises Michael Parkinson's chat shows, for instance, ("Come on, plug what you're doing and tell me those two stories we prepared earlier"), but accepts they are "probably better" than his own shows.

"I just think that whether my shows are better or worse - and I suspect that by most people's reckoning, they're worse - they at least represent work that I'm proud of."

His uncompromising style, he says, is inspired by the work of his comedy hero, Alexei Sayle, whom he first saw as a teenager.

"He was everything anti-showbiz that I'd ever seen. And he still is. No-one else has been that agitated, and remained funny. Most entertainers come on and say, Could you just love me for 20 minutes?"

Lamarr became a performer after climbing onstage at the first gig he'd ever attended. "Up to that moment, all I'd aspired to be was on the dole," he says.

"I'm not joking. I'd just done 11 years at school and I thought, Wow, now I can just hang about!

"I had no plans at all and even when I started doing OK on the stand-up circuit, I didn't think I could make a living at it. I used to have to ring up to get gigs in the back rooms of pubs that I wasn't even paid for."

At one such gig, Harry Enfield did an unpaid 'open mike' spot. "Three months later, Harry had his own series and I realised there might be money there after all."

Lamarr hopes his present tour will finally establish him as a stand-up first and a TV presenter second. But those snap judgements, he admits, will never fully escape him.

"If I'm honest, I do the same thing myself," he says. "I see someone on telly for two seconds, and think, 'I don't like him'."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.