Meet Daphne Fairfax.....

In fact, the title of that and his show An Evening with Daphne Fairfax - coming to Warwick Arts Centre on Sunday - refers to one of his most lived-in gags, which goes ‘My name is Arthur Smith, unless there’s anybody here from the Streatham tax office. In which case, I’m Daphne Fairfax.’

He isn’t Daphne Fairfax - a career of spontaneous nudity stands as proof - but the line is almost a checklist of Arthur Smith: deadpan, south London, south of respectable and with a punchline that’s almost music hall. Except speaking to the comedian, it turns out he isn’t most of those things either. Or rather he is, but he’s a lot of other things besides.

Take one of his jobs. As well as rock singer, roadsweeper, English teacher and comedian, he was art critic on Richard and Judy. The show booked him because they thought he’d say everything was a load of rubbish and a three-year-old could do better. When it turned out he took art and poetry seriously, he got the sack.

Then there’s the autobiography. He discusses the act of writing 100,000 words of prose rather earnestly, reminding me he’s written “four and a half” plays, two of which were quite successful. Some internet biographies tell you he studied creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia; he says it’s more complicated than that, but decides it would take too long to explain.

So why write it, and why now? “It helps being asked and offered money,” he says. “When you hit 50 there is a chance to look back at what you’ve done in a way that’s not appropriate when you’re 40, and various things happened so I had a definite ‘End of Act Two’ type thing.”

With a reputation for shows that became bar crawls and bar crawls almost as entertaining as his shows he was, in his own words, “a rather splendid drunk” until his pancreas began attacking itself. He almost died, and the illness left him diabetic.

In the same period, his father died and he took up with his current partner and adopted a quieter life. But to say it was the near-death experience, the relationship or the death of his father would be too neat.

Smith said: “Even before I was ill I realised I couldn’t quite carry on the way I was going. A chapter in my book was called Sprinting at a Brick Wall. I ran at it and limped away.”

Nothing fits expectations. Born Brian Smith in Greenwich in 1954, the owner of the wireless crackle accent went to grammar school, became head boy and went to university.

His father - “a wonderful man” - was a policeman and his mother was “a working class girl” who was evacuated during the Blitz and didn’t have a chance to pursue her own education, but encouraged her children.

“She was very good with words,” he says. “She took us to the theatre and she liked books. She took that impulse and fed it into me and my brothers. We were always encouraged to work hard. My father was less literary but he was a funny man and we learned from him.”

Smith’s older and plummier sounding brother Richard became editor of the British Medical Journal, trailing achievements in his wake as he grew up. Brian, or rather Arthur, felt he had to compete, but took a different route.

Having attended university during “the hippy hangover”, he opted for a life of “getting up late, reading books and hanging around with girls”. He lived in France for a year (he speaks French), sang in a rock band and took shows to the Edinburgh festival.

Then in 1981 he saw Alexei Sayle do a stand-up show at the Comic Strip in Soho, and realised his own sketches and songs had “the odour of formaldehyde”. Inspired, he booked himself a slot at the newly created Comedy Store and freely admits he ‘died’ for the first of many times.

Stand-up made Smith’s name, and his shows often took audiences on tours - not always historically accurate and often involving pubs - of towns and cities as a way of “experimenting with the form”.

For him, stand-up is like being “a solitary warrior”, and he relies on his own personality rather than a shield-wall of gags. In this interview, he is more serious than when performing, dry but not patronising and sarcastic without being cruel. Ask him where he gets his ideas from and he quotes the John Cleese response ‘I get them from a woman in a post office in south Wales’.

And the show? He sighs. “It will undoubtedly be a profoundly entertaining evening. If you’re not three inches taller and twice as happy when you leave you can try to get your money back.”

Arthur Smith will perform at Warwick Arts Centre on Sunday. Doors open at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £16. Call 024 7652 4524 for bookings.