The Lancastrian laughter-maker has enjoyed making TV shows – including the acclaimed Phoenix Nights – but performing live, where he can see the faces of his audience and hear their chuckles, is his biggest thrill.

That, and doing his bit to help horrifically injured bears kept in tiny cages in Asia and milked for their bile, used in traditional Chinese medicine. It's one captive audience he isn't pleased to see.

Spikey and his wife Kay travelled thousands of miles last year to Vietnam and China, where they visited bear "bile farms" as well as two rescue centres run by Animals Asia Foundation.

Spikey, who used to have a mini rescue sanctuary in his back garden for unwanted dogs, battery hens, goats and sheep, said: "Some things really touch you for some reason and the bears grabbed me more than most – I thought 'I have got to do something about this'.

"It was very sad, very upsetting. But there were 80 lined up for release into the care of the AAF and I chose one to be called Spikey. They're going to let me know when it's released. My wife chose one too."

Next month, Dave Spikey brings his hilarious 41-date national tour Laughter is the Best Medicine to the Victoria Theatre, Halifax on Saturday, April 12.

It's not the first time he's been here – some years ago, supporting Welsh comedian Max Boyce, he says he was ticked off by theatre management for bringing fish and chips into the building.

But minor disagreements are not enough to send this down-to-earth comic scuttling off to the safety of the small screen. The Double British Comedy Award Winner said: "There's nothing really like stand-up; it's my favourite by a mile. I'm lucky to have got to the stage where people pay to come and see you and have a laugh with you for the night. I can make eye contact with them.

"You can write a great line for TV and someone at home laughs but you can't hear them. With stand-up you can hit 2,000 people with a line you just thought of on the way there. It's the immediacy of it that I like. The way I talk is very conversational."

Calderdale people would do well to keep out of the headlines in the run-up to his visit on Saturday, April 12, as he'll be scouring the Courier for stories on which to put his own "blurred perspective", as he calls it. One tale, many miles from here, involved the court case of a man who had assaulted his mother-in-law by breaking a picture over her head.

"I haven't seen that since Terry and June in 1968. It was during a row over a bacon sandwich," he said.

Spikey has his own interpretation of how newspaper offices work, as anyone who saw his comedy series Dead Man Weds, also starring Johnny Vegas, will know.

It was all guesswork, he said, and he named the editor after his dad, Gordon. But the editor of his local newspaper, which he visited to see if his comedy was true to life, had the same name and apparently believed the character was modelled on him.