Former political broadcaster John Sergeant tells Charles Hutchinson about his dreams of being a comic.

THIS is John Sergeant, former BBC correspondent and ITN political editor, on a theatre stage, on tour in Great Britain.

"I was asked if I would do it, and I thought, 'Well, this won't last", and I wasn't at all sure I should be going around the country," says the veteran broadcaster, whose deadpan self-deprecation and crumpled comic demeanour has come to the fore on Have I Got News For You? Room 101 and BBC Radio 4's Quote Unquote.

Sergeant will be on stage at the Grand Opera House, York, on Thursday for the latest encounter of An Audience With John Sergeant, a question-and-answer session he has grown to enjoy in his year on the road since leaving ITN at the end of 2003.

His initial doubts have subsided. "They settle down in their seats and you think 'How will I entertain this audience for two hours?' but in fact it passes quickly, and because they're a self-selected audience, they're not cynically trying to put you down but are egging you on," he says.

John has enjoyed re-charging the comic batteries in his career memoirs Give Me Ten Seconds, on TV and on tour, taking him back to his post-Oxford University days when he joined Alan Bennett in his comedy series On The Margin.

"I'm keen to do jokes as much as I'm allowed," he says. "Obviously that's what I like doing, though you don't want to lark about too much on the news as they think, 'Hold on, he should be doing another programme' or 'Who's that idiot?', but now I'm free, I can do these shows... and also, I just like jokes."

In 30 years in broadcasting for the BBC, in Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Washington and at Westminster, the joker in John Sergeant was held in check. Did that frustrate him? "No, to be honest. I just felt... it's an awful clich... I just felt it was an enormous privilege. I didn't think, 'I could be an amazing personality if only they'd let me'. I thought it was pretty incredible to be able to stand there night after night without a script talking about politics. I didn't think, 'Why won't they let me rule the world?'.

"Everyone lives a few lives in their life, and it's nice to be able to do that. As a broadcaster, what you're trying to do is see how much you can have in your repertoire. You have to see how much you can do serious things, how much you can get away with jokes, and jump pretty quickly from one to the other," he says.

"People always think of me as being quite larky. It's just one of those things that starts when you're a kid. I wanted to be a comedian as a child because comedians were the only adults who were really prepared to talk to us about the things we were most interested in, and that was us. They had that deep inner desire that children have to fool around."

The more serious side of John Sergeant manifests itself in his latest book, Maggie: Her Fatal Legacy. Their careers had converged in 1990 in one famous collision of Margaret Thatcher's handbag and Sergeant's body, when she interrupted his report outside the Paris Embassy to announce her participation in the second round of the Conservative Party leadership ballot.

"Obviously I'd made a hideous mistake but if you don't make a big mistake, no one knows who you are. It was my Michael Fish moment and it had a good effect on my career after that, though she tried to pretend that the incident had never happened.

"To her, she just went out and made her announcement. That's why she was so funny; she was so deadly serious," John says.

"She would be by far the most interesting politician I've encountered because she was always producing copy: the heroics, the mock heroics and the plain daft.

"She was a great Prime Minister but her party is still in the doldrums, and that's her fatal legacy."

An Audience With John Sergeant, Grand Opera House, York, Thursday, 7.30pm. Tickets: £15, £12.50; ring 0870 606 3590.

Updated: 08:50 Saturday, March 12, 2005