OUT of all the places that North Eastern comic Ross Noble pounced on in his Tweet-driven television series Ross Noble Freewheeling, York was the most fruitful.

You can see the results of Ross’s mischief-making in episodes five and six on the Dave satellite channel on November 26 and December 3.

Filmed over six weeks in the summer, Freewheeling was built around the premise of Noble “taking on Britain one Tweet at a time”, responding spontaneously to Twitter feeds as he went from city to city.

“Nothing was planned in advance,” said Ross, as he held court at the Malmaison hotel in Leeds after a door-by-door search beyond Middle Earth for his interview chambers. “Ah, this must be the Mal-function room,” quipped What’s On.

“They were thinking of calling the restaurant Malnutrition, but thought better of it,” came Ross’s superior gag.

Anyway, back to Freewheeling. “There were no rules, apart from not being allowed to feature children or vulnerable people – and we weren’t allowed to put anyone in danger. Well, apart from me, which is why it’s funny,” said Ross. “And I had to be nice to everyone but then that’s a rule I always apply anyway.”

Ross has a long affiliation with York, going back to his days of cutting his teeth in stand-up comedy as the master of ceremonies for Mike Bennett’s Comedy Shack nights at the Bonding Warehouse. So he was delighted when his Twitter feeds directed him to the city in July.

“Probably out of the six hours of telly for the series, York was the most time we spent anywhere,” said Ross. “I got sent there because of two things, and the first, I would say, was my favourite thing in the whole series.

“There’s a café next to Grand Opera House run by Big Rick, and someone tweeted to say they worked in the futon shop opposite there and Lesley Joseph [the Birds Of A Feather star] had just come into the café in a bad mood.”

The veteran actress was appearing in a stage version of the long-running BBC sitcom at the theatre at the time. “She’d gone up to Rick and asked for a decaf Earl Grey, and Big Rick is going, ‘No, there’s such thing as decaf Earl Grey’,” recounted Ross.

Whereupon Noble turned up at Rick’s café – TC’s Coffee Shop in Clifford’s Street –and heard his full story.

“The next thing, she’s pulled out her own tea bags and demanded hot water, Rick said, so I decide that I’m going to do a re-enactment of the incident entitled Tea’d Off in the over-the-top style of Banged Up Abroad [on the National Geographic Channel].”

For this “revolutionary depiction of the coffee shop’s experience with a celebrity customer”, Ross had a young, nine-stone little guy who “couldn’t look less like big, tall, stocky, well-over-6ft Rick” play the café boss. Ross himself would play Lesley to “restore the café’s faith in celebrities”.

“Above Rick’s café is a tattooist’s, and as they’re all brilliant sketch artists, I went up there and asked this young lad to sketch a picture of Lesley Joseph, which I would then stick to my head,” said Ross.

What happened next was the stuff of television comedy gold. “I’m sitting there in the café re-enacting Lesley Joseph being annoyed, with my Lesley face on, when she walks by the window,” said Ross.

What did he do then? “No, you’ll just have to watch episode five to find out what she did next.”

Fair enough, but we can reveal that it ended with Lesley receiving a big bouquet of flowers from Ross.

A further Tweet sent Noble freewheeling his way to the York Festival of Ideas at the invitation of the University of York. “I thought I was just going to turn up and observe quietly, but I blagged my way on to the panel of experts talking about the future of the modern city,” he said.

Meanwhile, back in York city centre, his attention was drawn to “two guys that bore a striking resemblance to Alan Yentob” [the BBC creative director and culture presenter]. “So I invented this thing called Yentobing, and in one classic Yentob, I got them to stand behind each other and ask this guy the time and by the time he looked up again, they had switched positions and swapped hats without him realising,” said Ross.

There was one other rule that he applied: no tourist attraction should feature in Freewheeling as “it’s a sort of anti-travel show”, he reasoned. “The only famous attraction you see in York is the Minster, which you see for about four seconds.”

Avoiding familiar landmarks, Ross conducted his own ghost walk. “I noted how everyone in York is connected to a ghost tour. They’re either a ghost-walk tour guide or they’re a ghost, so I started taking people around York city centre as a ghost tour guide, just making up stories.

“It was just me mucking about, having a laugh, but people were loving it and because they saw me with a full film crew, walking around with an umbrella, these Japanese tourists joined in, thinking I must have been a TV historian,” he said.

York proved an endless source of inspiration. “Someone suggested I should do my own version of the Antiques Roadshow, but not everyone has antiques, and they’re a bit elitist, so I asked people to bring down their tat for the Absolute Tat Roadshow,” says Ross.

“I needed somewhere to hold it, and because they usually do it in places like stately homes, I did it in this ‘strip joint’, at The Mansion, where they have these individual booths with tassles where the dancers take the punters for private dances, but for my show I’ve got people in there with their bric-a-brac.”

Ross will return to York in his new stand-up show, Tangentleman, on October 16 and 17 next year, and unlike Freewheeling, he will restrict his mischief-making to the York Barbican stage.

• Ross Noble’s television series, Ross Noble Freewheeling, is showing on Tuesday nights at 10pm on Dave. His Tangentleman tour will visit Harrogate Royal Hall, October 15; York Barbican, October 16 and 17. His new DVD, Mindblender, is out on Monday, November 18.