Jeremy Hardy plays the Harrogate Comedy Festival, Harrogate Theatre, October 19

At a time when the fulminating Daily Mail has seen fit to dismiss modern British comedy – or at least its columnist Quentin Letts has – Charles Hutchinson discusses the life of a stand-up with stalwart satirist Jeremy Hardy.

GOOD afternoon Jeremy..or is it?

“’Tis the afternoon,” he replies, deadpan.

No, is it a good afternoon? “Oh it’s all right. It’s wet today in South London.”

Jeremy Hardy, BBC Radio 4 satirist and sage social observer on the British comedy circuit, is coming to terms with life under the Con-Dems. “Things have changed in some ways since I was last in Yorkshire. We’re having to get used being under a Conservative government again, and it’s horrible, especially as they’re younger than me. It’s odd having a Prime Minister younger than me in charge; it feels like the country’s being run by someone’s younger brother. [Spookily, this interview took place before Miliband minor knifed Miliband major in the back].

“Obviously the Coalition aren’t dramatically different from Blair and Brown, plunging half the country into misery”.

And where does it leave the droll, ever so slightly miserable Jeremy Hardy? “It leaves me just carrying on; you kind of have to keep doing your job. Different things happen. Blair didn’t really move to the right and neither did Brown,” he says. “It’s the perceptions that are different; the ideologies are pretty much the same across the parties.”

Age has not withered his wit, alhough maybe Jeremy has mellowed as he heads for 50 next July? “I think as you get older, you realise that the world might not change in the way you first wished it to. I’d say I’m outwardly pessimistic but underneath I’m an optimist, as you still have to believe that things will get better. Human beings have a great capacity for good as well as evil, even on the same day,” he says.

“Twenty-five years ago I would not have predicted that the Berlin Wall would have come down or that Nelson Mandela would have become president of South Africa, but I might have wished that we would have moved more to the left, though we are a more tolerant society now.”

Can comedians make a difference by shaping attitudes for change? “I’m just a humble clown. That’s what my job is. I think people over-mystify comedy, when you’re just talking out loud. Barristers have to do that too,” he says.

“People try to mystify it to justify that it’s not a normal job by talking about it as if it’s rather more complicated than it is.”

Whereupon York Twenty4Seven reeled off six reasons why comedians stood out from the 9-to-5 crowd. Jeremy listened graciously…then knocked down the newly assembled pedestal. “Seven! You have to wish to exist on a diet of sandwiches,” he scoffs.

Yet aren’t comedians brave, facing a room of strangers each night with their unpredictable responses? “Some comedians are brave, but there are different types of comedians,” says Jeremy. “Sometimes you go and see someone and you really, really laugh, and then you go outside afterwards and you can’t remember anything, but with me, I’m more serious than that.

“I want to take people on a journey, telling them about things that can be profound, or, like one of Shakespeare’s fools, you can deal in the dark as well as frippery in your role as a clown.”

Jeremy Hardy will carry on his comic journey, but he notes that maybe that journey becomes harder. “It’s difficult to keep going as a comedian. It’s easier at the start, when you’re more excited and hungry and more impressed by people looking at you,” he says.

“As I get older, I get more annoyed with myself. You hear people saying they’re tired of old left-wing ranting, and I say, ‘well, imagine being me’.

“On the other hand, it’s a privilege to have people come and want to listen to you, so you don’t want to abuse that.”

Jeremy’s most recent appearance in York at the Theatre Royal in September 2009 was the most serious night’s comedy this writer has ever seen. “If I see a comedian it’s because I’m interested in their world view, and that’s why people come and see me…partly out of concern, to see that I’m OK, but they’re also interested in my thought processes, in the same way that people read columnists,”

he says. “It would be interesting to see a stand-up columnist.”

Jeremy’ 2010 show comes with no title, allowing him to roam wherever he wishes. “I haven’t got a special subject or a theme because I’m constantly on the road. If I changed titles, they’d think they were getting something new, when it’s just me treading water.”

Maybe so, but he still makes a splash.

* Jeremy Hardy plays the Harrogate Comedy Festival at Harrogate Theatre on Tuesday at 8pm. See harrogatetheatre.co.uk for the full programme for a festival that runs until October 23. Box office: 01423 502116.

Toby Clouston-Jones answers back...

• FOLLOWING the death of old-stager Norman Wisdom, was the Daily Mail columnist, political sketch writer and theatre critic Quentin Letts right when he suggested that today’s British comics were smug, scornful, obsessed with sex and flatulence, and didn’t know what real humour was?

Toby Clouston-Jones, promoter of the Hyena Lounge Comedy Club at City Screen, York, and co-organiser of Harrogate Comedy Festival 2010, takes a different view...

Throughout Quentin Letts’ ill researched, poorly written article is the feeling of an unhappy author who pines for a bygone era viewed through rose-tinted spectacles.

While there’s no doubt that some comedy of the past, in the same way as some comedy of the present and no doubt that of the future, is of a high standard that stretches boundaries and the way that we think about things, the majority of it was rubbish.

As both a comedy producer and historical obsessive on the subject, I’m lucky enough to own hundreds of books and many thousand hours of footage archiving comedy and its performance, dating back as far as the Ancient Greeks and their love of the mother-in-law-joke (no one seems to fully understand why but they were as popular in the 5th Century BC as they were in the Seventies!).

Jokes about bodily functions and sex were the staple of any night of amusement in Roman times. However, if they were to be recreated today laughter would hardly fill the room.

Morecambe & Wise spent the vast majority of their careers bottoming bills of variety theatres and their lucky break on television was more of a fluke than anything else. Even now if you watch the superb DVD box set of their Christmas specials, there is a lot of very poor material being used as filler for a handful of astoundingly brilliant sketches that we all still hold very dear to our hearts. Funny how we seem to only remember the good ones.

However, one thing is for certain: there has never been as much comedy on the television as now. There has never been as much comedy filling our comedy clubs, theatres and, dare one say, arenas as now.

Who would have guessed that Michael McIntyre would have sold more tickets in the UK in 2009 than U2?