Golden Freddie is still acting up

Freddie Starr launches his latest tour in the Black Country next month. He talks to Mark Andrews about his career, reality television - and setting fire to his hair.

Putting on one of the strangest accents since Amy Turtle, Freddie Starr booms: "Oi will be cumming to Doood-Lye."

It was never going to be the easiest of interviews. One minute he is darkly serious, talking about the toll showbusiness has taken on his personal life and his bad experiences of hospital.

The next minute he is in madcap slapstick mode, waxing lyrical about the joys of setting fire to his hair. The rest of the time it is hard to tell whether he is joking or serious.

"How do you find people in the Mid..." I venture. "I find them when I get there, when I walk out from the curtain," he interrupts.

The Liverpudlian actually has a genuine affinity with the region. His third wife Donna is from Redditch, and he now lives in the West Midlands. "I love the Midlands, it is fantastic. The people have a great sense of humour; they are nice people."

You certainly can't accuse the veteran comic of playing it straight. When his latest tour - to mark 50 years in showbusiness - opens at Dudley Concert Hall next month, even he has no idea what his act will involve.

"I never know what I'm going to do, I just sort of walk on and do me," he says.

"I was the first alternative comic. I don't tell jokes like Les Dawson did. I talk about life, unless I decide I want to tell jokes - then I will just do it."

Although he seemed to be a near-permanent fixture on television in the 1970s and 80s, the 65-year-old says he prefers working on stage, saying the restrictions imposed by television companies often mean his shows lose a bit of the chaotic mayhem.

He rates his 1996 show An Audience With Freddie Starr as his best TV performance.

"I said I wanted to set fire to my hair, and Nigel Lythgoe said 'If he wants to set fire to his hair, let him. It's him who's going to be on fire. That was the first time I ever had a free rein to do what I wanted to."

He is hoping his latest tour will give him the chance to put a difficult few months behind him.

"It's been a bit of a nightmare this year. I have been in a wheelchair for three months. I have had operations on my cartilage, and the first operation got infected. I then had to go to a place where the footballers go, and he made a good job of it."

After coming out of hospital he appeared on Celebrity Wife Swap, another experience he found less than enjoyable.

"That sort of television is c**p as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't show how you are in your real daily life," he says.

During the programme, he repeatedly clashed with his wife for the week, former glamour model Samantha Fox, who accused him of not pulling his weight with household chores.

"She knew I had had an operation, but she said 'do you want come out for a run'," he says, clearly still annoyed. "I went 'why do you think I have got my leg on a table? How can I go out for a run?'."

One reality TV programme which Starr really wants to appear in is The X Factor - although it is probably unlikely Simon Cowell will be taking him up on his offer.

"I would put the bad ones through, and the ones that Simon Cowell likes, I would say they're no good, just to wind him up," he says.

"I would love to do my own version of the X Factor with the bad singers on. Simon Cowell can have the good ones, and I will have the bad ones."

Becoming serious for a moment, he says many of today's TV talent shows demonstrate how many youngsters have unrealistic expectations of instant fame, without having to work for it.

"The kids today expect so much, but you have got to work hard.

"They have the audacity to come on and say 'I'm great, I want to be a big star, I want to perform in those big stadiums', and that's before anyone's heard them sing.

"You couldn't go on the stage of these theatres if you hadn't got 15 or 20 years experience in my day.

"When I was a young lad I had to play some right dives in Liverpool, where people were fighting, and people would say 'keep on performing', even while all that was going on."

At least he is unlikely to experience anything like that when he appears in Dudley on October 6.

Despite the hard times that he has endured - his first two marriages ended in divorce - this very complex character insists he has no desire to retire and settle down for a quieter life.

"You go through three marriages because of this. You get well paid for doing what you do, but then you hear this voice . . . 'It's me, your conscience'," he says in a sinister growl. "'You've screwed up, and you're going to go through so much pain'."

And then reverting to his normal voice, he adds philosophically: "You then realise that you like making people laugh so much that it doesn't become about money any more.

"If you can make just one person laugh, out of an audience of 2,000, then it's worthwhile."

By Mark Andrews