Q:ÌýÌýHave you gigged much in Leicester? A:ÌýÌýI've mainly played the Leicester comedy festival. This year I performed my Little Howard Appeal Show twice and compared a stand-up show as well. I always like playing Leicester. Because it has a comedy festival the locals are pretty comedy savvy. Q:ÌýÌýHow were your recent Comedy Festival shows? A:ÌýÌýThey were great fun. Both of my solo shows sold well and we got a really good audience reaction. My favorite of the two was at Bambu, because it was a nice, intimate venue and the crowd were great. I also compared the Big Value Comedy Show at The Musician and that was mental. It was a late night show and I think most of the audience had been at the Absinth or something. Maybe it was a full moon, they were fun, but really weird. Q:ÌýÌýHow did you get into Stand Up? A:ÌýÌýI fell. I was up at the Edinburgh festival with some friends of mine who were in a play and a friend of mine said he was doing a slot at a late night cabaret show. I said I'd give it a go as well, and it turned out I was quite good at it. I thought I'd give it a go and did more gigs when I moved to London and they all went very well as too. If they hadn't I'd never have carried on. So I thought I'd try to make a living at it and it worked! And I've never looked back, accept to find out where I dropped my money. Q:ÌýÌýWho are your favourite current comedians? A:ÌýÌýJosie Long is brilliant. Stewart Lee is hilarious, but a little bit evil. On telly Vic and Bob still make me really laugh, but they haven't been up to much lately. Q:ÌýÌýHow did your Perrier Nomination in 2003 affect your career? A:ÌýÌýIt really helped. I got to perform my show all over the world in Melbourne, New York, Aspen, Stockholm. I went on telly in Australia and got on the Tonight Show in the US (if only for twenty seconds). It also tricked a lot of people who didn't think I was funny into booking me. I was the only British nominee so it gave me a good 15 to 20 minutes of fame. Sometimes it's a hindrance. When you get introduced as a Perrier Nominee some crowds think, "well he better be bloody funny then" and it makes it quite hard work. Other than that it's been great. Q:ÌýÌýYou regularly appear at Robin Ince's Book Club. What sort of stuff do you normally contribute? A:ÌýÌýI do, and it's brilliant. We're touring it at the moment and it's going down very well (apart from in Hemel Hempstead, they were very confused). My usual contribution is that I play songs on the Ukulele that I've written. A couple of times I've written a song with Josie Long, who is another Book Club regular. It's nice to do something different from my normal stand-up act and from my Little Howard shows, and that's what Book Club is all about; letting performers experiment a bit. Q:ÌýÌýIf there were no limits to what you could achieve, where would you like to be in ten years time? A:ÌýÌýI'd like to be an English Matt Groening, with a personal chef and a cloak made of bees. | 
