From car valet to comic - Bob Mills has cleaned up as both. David Behrens spoke to him.

Last week, a former star of Coronation Street was revealed to be working at a back street car wash.

It's a shame that it's not in his nature to patronise a fellow entertainer, because the comedian Bob Mills would have been uniquely well placed to show him the ropes.

The unfortunate Warren Jackson, who played Gail and Brian Tilsley's son Nicky until the producers re-cast the part, told a newspaper that he was working at the LA Wash in Manchester to help a friend as a favour. Casual employment such as that, according to Mills, is the bottom rung on a peculiarly aggressive automotive career ladder.

He should know. He made the car wash-showbiz transition himself, albeit the other way around.

"I was valeting cars for a living in King's Cross when I became a comic," he recalls. "That's valeting, mind you, not washing. There's a difference."

The hierarchy in the car wash business is, as he describes it, worthy of West Side Story. "Oh, my God! Don't ever get people's titles wrong," he says. "It would be like calling the butler a cloakroom boy."

Mills, who graduated from the grease pit to hosting his own Channel Four series, and who will shortly bring his stand-up show to West Yorkshire, is a veritable encyclopaedia of car wash etiquette.

"You go to any decent car wash and it's regimented like a hotel kitchen," he says.

"There are the Small Boys, recruited for their size, who go inside the cars, and do the seats and the ashtrays. Then you get the Outside Boys, and even there there's a hierarchy. Some of them will have to do the wheels and the engines - they're the Grease Boys. The top nobs, before you get up to my level of Valeter, are the Shammies - the ones who polish and chamois the cars. They like to think they're a breed above the rest.

"If someone tried to get on to someone else's territory there'd be hell."

The mark of a good car wash, he says, is one that wouldn't look out of place in San Diego. "It's got to be called King something or Kleen with a k and two e's."

Mills wrung out his wash rag for the last time at the end of the Eighties, and headed for Leeds. A former miner's cottage in Chapel Allerton was his base for a short-lived YTV soap called Hollywood Sports. "Very weird, that. We put in a proposal for a soap opera, and I think it must have been commissioned by someone who'd only just started at Yorkshire and didn't know about Emmerdale."

The idea - great on paper, a nightmare in practice - was for viewers to write the storylines, which would then be performed by a cast of actors on location at a health club in Yeadon.

"We had lots of ridiculous ideas from the public," says Mills. "Quite a few alien abductions, and one particularly strange story in which the sports centre was swallowed up by an earthquake. You had to stretch credibility a bit to take that one in... like accepting that the whole of Leeds, Bradford and Harrogate stood on a fault and could all disappear into Ilkley Moor at any moment. "Besides, we couldn't afford any special effects, other than wobbling the camera and throwing talcum powder on to the set."

Mills's later and more successful TV series include the long-running quiz Win, Lose or Draw and LWT's cultish In Bed With Medinner.

His C4 series, however, was a less happy experience. The plan was to film not only the show but also the behind-the-scenes tantrums - including his own.

"But Channel Four wanted it to be more serious than it actually was," he says. "It was a battle I couldn't win, and that's why I'm not doing another series."

Instead, he has a sitcom, a quiz and a new series of Medinner on the go.

But they'll have to work around the World Cup, he insists. "I'll be damned if I'm missing Bulgaria vs Haiti just to further my TV career."

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