Jack Dee has made a career out of being a right old misery but he's no hard man, reports CHARLES HUTCHINSON

Curmudgeon Jack Dee is back doing what he loves best, live stand-up comedy. "It's the first thing I got into and it's still the thing I enjoy most,'' says deadpan Dee, whose 50-date autumn trek arrives in York on Saturday for a sold-out show at the Grand Opera House.

''Live comedy is such a great form of entertainment - it never palls. Actually, it gets more exciting as you push yourself further. I don't sit there and analyse it, but I try to extend myself and produce something that people aren't expecting.

"It's thrilling to go out there after a while away from the stage and find that you're better than you remembered and capable of more subtlety that you thought,'' he says.

Jack Dee started on September 18 and is on the road until December 18, returning to touring after two years of pursuing television projects, in particular Jack Dee's Happy Hour on BBC1.

As ever, Dee's dour live act will be a forum for expressing his exasperation at those little things in modern life that always seem to go wrong. "Ultimately, everything I'm cross about is down to me, and the audience warm to me being sufficiently human to own up to these faults. They enjoy me exposing my frailties because there's a certain amount of honesty in it," he says.

''Watching me on stage, audiences go 'Phew, he's thought that, too. I'm not the only person on the planet who thinks that'. It's the comedy of recognition. I draw out of people a moment of recognising something that they'd never quite put into words. It's like when you read a novel and it suddenly puts in a nutshell something you'd always vaguely thought.''

In advance of the tour, Dee pinned to his central London office walls a hit list of topics for his barbed analysis: computers, the National Health Service, tattoos, pyramid tea bags and anti-capitalist rioters.

"Being irritated is what makes me tick. I strip everything down and look at it from every angle in order to find out why my response is mild annoyance or absolute rage. If you can sing or write music, you'll explore that facility. It's about how you interpret the world," he says. "My immediate response is to interpret things through comedy, and my sense of comedy is curmudgeonly. At times, I find things difficult and depressing, but the saving grace is that I have a release on stage and can turn my inner turmoil into laughter.

''It also gives audiences the licence to live in that world of unreasonableness that I inhabit for the time I'm with them. It's like when you're with a group of friends down the pub; you appoint one person to be the court jester and say those things that shouldn't be said.''

Dee is keen to play down his tag as the hard man of comedy. "It was never true, just a phrase I coined when I wrote a John Smith ad. It was all about how I never compromised in my comedy, and then a huge bag of money was placed on the table and I immediately started dancing with a penguin," he says.

"The image stuck but it's a complete misconception. If it were the case, I wouldn't have lasted. As a comedian, you can't be a tough guy because you have to expose your frailties. If you don't come across as vulnerable, your act won't have much longevity. If you come on and just say 'I hate this and that' and think it's very clever, it won't work because it doesn't draw anyone to your world.''

Dee's popularity rose still higher this year on account of Celebrity Big Brother but that was never his motive behind participating in the Comic Relief televised event. "Some poor people thought everyone was doing it just to boost their flagging careers, and although that may have been the case with one or two of them, it certainly wasn't true of me and Claire Sweeney. I think that's one of the reasons why we came through,'' he says.

He had no idea what was in store for him. "It was something I agreed to do after having four glasses of wine. I'd never seen it before - if I had, I would have said 'No'!" says Dee, who has never watched the tapes since leaving the Big Brother house.

"I'd rather live with my memory and the deluded thought that I came out of it all right. Watching yourself is always unbearable. It's like looking at yourself in the mirror when you've just woken up.''

Welcome to happy glower, Jack Dee style.