Comedian Ross Noble will be spinning more surreal stories when he visits York next week, as CHARLES HUTCHINSON discovers.

ON Monday, at the Grand Opera House, astronomer Sir Patrick Moore will be gazing at Mars. On Sunday, same theatre, North Eastern comic Ross Noble will be orbiting... well, you can never be sure what planet this story-spinning surrealist will be on.

Take his attitude to sport. "This is the weird thing, I don't really follow sport at all. So when I tour in Australia, they go 'You're rubbish at cricket. Aren't you?' and I go 'Are we? Don't know. I don't watch it', and that really winds them up'," he says.

"What's weird is that over there cricket is like football over here. They all play at it school; here it's just played by posh people or those with access to an even surface."

Just like in his shows, Ross improvises on the spot in interview, spinning off at unexpected tangents, and as the subject drifts from touring Australia, to cricket, to playing surfaces, somehow he ends up back where it all started: his own beginnings.

"I'm from a very pleasant new town, Cramlington, just north of Newcastle, and it's what Milton Keynes is to London. They came along in the 1970s and found there was nothing there and then five years later there was a town," says the Geordie, now 27.

"There used to be three pit villages and farmers' fields, and then strangely, about the time I was born this new town was created.

"Outside my mum and dad's house there was like a big park, but it wasn't very good for cricket as it was waterlogged for 99 per cent of the year, and when I say it was a park it was more like a bog."

Ah, by a circuitous route, his thinking had come round to cricket again.

Sunday's show will be Ross's second visit to the Grand Opera House, following his sold-out Sonic Waffle tour date in February, when jazz-playing dwarves on lawnmowers and wizards with neck ache were the issues of the day most vexing him.

This weekend he returns to York with his new show, Unrealtime, premiered this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe in the lavish Assembly Rooms.

"They were a bit too real, the Assembly Rooms. Quite a bizarre place for performing with this massive chandelier in the middle," he recalls.

He then transferred to the "very posh" Garrick Theatre in London for a month, and again found himself in the vicinity of objects of mirth.

"The four weeks there coincided with David Blaine starving himself in his box and Michael Barrymore being up the road, so there was quite a lot of stuff around that affected the show's content."

After only a two-week break Ross was back on his travels on November 8 for an autumn tour.

"I'd needed a bit of a sit-down, as I had about a year's worth of clothes I needed to unpack. I got one of those Ipods and I've been attempting to put every CD I've got on there, which must be the modern equivalent of stacking all your LPs in alphabetical order," he says.

Here is a comic who likes to make an already mad world even madder, hence the Unrealtime title for his 2003 show.

"I never like to call a show something that might give away the theme in case I decide to change the show half way through. Like if I say 'Ross Noble talks about the woodland' and then I don't, people will say 'Hey, you didn't do that'."

The inspiration for Unrealtime came from 24, the ground-breaking American television series that played out its 24 episodes over a 24-hour time span.

"That was very gritty and down to earth and done in real time, and I thought it would be good to do something in unreal time, as most of my material starts somewhere real and then enters its own world and goes off wherever," he says.

"And then there was also this guy in Australia who three nights in a row came out of my show saying 'unreal', and that struck home."

So, Unrealtime was born, and it really will be in York on Sunday at 8pm, wherever Ross's mind may roam that night.

Tickets update: Selling fast at £14; booking advised on 0870 606 3595.

Updated: 10:13 Friday, November 21, 2003