Hitting the road again, Jack Dee is as irritable as ever, railing mercilessly against the little things that bug him. Charles Hutchinson reports.

DEADPAN Jack Dee is embarking on his first stand-up tour for three years, and his mood is no better.

"I keep my feet on the ground by remaining constantly annoyed about everything, and long may that continue," says Jack, who narrows his eyes like Clint Eastwood when his thoughts turn to iPods, cold callers and "neighbours who try to borrow stuff off you".

At 42, Dee shows no sign of mellowing, as Sunday's sell-out audience at the Grand Opera House in York will discover. "'Nothing beats the thrill of live performance," he says. "When stand-up is going well, it's the most exhilarating hit you can get. When the ideas are flowing and you're improvising, it's like being able to fly. It's the biggest buzz you'll ever have."

By implication, it must be a bigger buzz than the diverse television and film commitments that have been Dee's focus in recent years, when he has presented Jack Dee Live At The Apollo; played an oleaginous government minister in The Deputy; and starred in Tunnel Of Love, Simon Nye's comic tale of romance amid the fairground attractions.

This year, he has film cameos upcoming in Anthony Byrne's Short Order and The Last Drop, a Second World War movie from Spivs director Colin Teague, and another series of Jack Dee Live At The Apollo awaits in the autumn. However, the liberating opportunities afforded by stand-up are never far from his mind.

"It's something I'll always want to be doing. Sometimes I'll leave it alone for a year, but it will always be the bedrock of what I'm about," Jack says. "Success breeds success on stage. Once you've got something good going, it mushrooms into something you've never considered before. If you can tap into that vein of inspiration, it just keeps on working and there's no end to what you can produce."

In his latest show, for example, he has developed the simple germ of an idea into a half-hour routine on his annoyance at having people to stay.

"I hate it when people want to help after dinner. They always offer to do the drying-up; that really gets on my nerves because they don't know where to put anything. Why don't they just put their money where their mouth is and volunteer to do the washing up, which is clearly a far worse job?" the old curmudgeon says. "Once I started developing this theme, the resentment just mounted and I built it into a whole section of the show."

Analysing his material, Jack notes how his indignation is focused on "things that go unspoken until I speak them". "That's all I do. I'm paid to do nothing other than concentrate on the pointless stuff in life. I have to bring up the things that have absolutely no bearing on anything and turn them into routines," he says, his comic tone turning to self-deprecation.

"I talk about things that preoccupy me, but I've got nothing significant to add to the greater good. I'm quite happy to admit that I talk about nothing very profound. Big stuff just leaves me behind. When Seinfeld was accused of talking about nothing, he replied 'There's a shortage of nothing'.

"I don't apologise for my show being about nothing. I'd frankly be embarrassed if I tried to address the world's problems in a didactic way. A comedian who comes on with all the answers is just not funny: 'Ladies and gentlemen, what we should be doing is this'. And your point is? Stand-ups are much funnier when they present themselves as part of the problem."

Anger will always be Jack Dee's comic weapon of choice. "I do get very annoyed about things. My act is about me working up a head of steam over the smallest subject. Being unreasonably angry about the most minor point is very funny, and it says more about the woes of the world than I could ever manage," he suggests.

"Road rage is a telling example; that's just people becoming proprietorial about something they should share. If you blow that attitude up, it shows that so often human nature is its own worst enemy. I don't have a problem hanging on to my anger: That is actually how I think. It's not put on. It doesn't finish at the end of the show."

From iPods to cold-callers trying to peddle cheaper gas, Jack points up the march of modern-day irritants that all too quickly become uniformly accepted. "All I write about is stuff that happens to people. Being on television hasn't changed my life; I still have to go to the supermarket and motorway service stations, so I'm always able to find a common ground with my audience," he says.

"The underlying theme is questioning everything that everyone else takes for granted. I look twice at stuff that so far has got off scot-free."

Jack Dee, Grand Opera House, York, Sunday, 8pm, sold out. Box office: 0870 606 3590.

Updated: 16:11 Thursday, April 07, 2005