Punt & Dennis have been having satirical fun at the expense of the news for 30 year now. No one is more surprised about that than Hugh Dennis, as he tells CHARLES HUTCHINSON.

NEXT year will be the 30th anniversary of satirists Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis first performing together.

“I didn’t foresee that. I don’t think you ever do,” says Hugh, who met Steve at Cambridge University in 1983 and teamed up with him in 1985. “When you’re told ‘it’s 30 years’, you say, ‘Is it?’ because you just continue the things you like doing.”

Punt & Dennis initially made their mark on the nation as half of The Mary Whitehouse Experience, alongside David Baddiel and Robert Newman, and have become BBC Radio 4 regulars with The Now Show and It’s Been A Bad Week.

Both contribute to BBC2’s topical panel game Mock The Week, Dennis as a regular panellist, Punt as a programme associate, while Dennis has just returned to BBC1’s Wednesday night 9pm slot as the harassed, outsmarted dad in Outnumbered.

Punt & Dennis’s roots, however, lay in live performance, originally in the superior breeding ground of the Cambridge Footlights. They are back on the road once more this winter, playing the Grand Opera House in York on Sunday night.

“We love live shows because it’s immediate; it’s obvious really,” says Hugh, who turns 52 today. “In everything else, there are cameras in the way or microphones in the way. Playing live, it’s slightly scary and it’s good to feel that way.

“When people come on Mock The Week, they’re very nervous, but though that’s a good thing, if you get it wrong, you can always do it again. It used to be so competitive but gradually it mirrors your own life, where you become more comfortable in your own skin.”

Hugh plays down Punt & Dennis’s achievements as a long–running satirical duo by saying: “Where Steve and I have been lucky is that you have to have the fuel to drive a show and we were given a topical show early on, so you always knew that the joke would come from the news and news is always new,” he says.

“You just have to do jokes about things, but of course themes keep repeating themselves and that can be frustrating comedically because you have to find another joke when scandals are like other scandals.

“But I think we’re very lucky because there’s a constant stream of things, and it’s therapy to comment on them.”

Hugh demurs at the suggestion that satirists are in a powerful position as commentators on the issues of the day.

“We just make jokes about the news. Satire doesn’t necessarily bring down governments,” he says, dismissing any such definition of satire as “incredibly over-reaching”.

Unlike traditional funny guy and straight guy double acts, the Punt & Dennis partnership is “like a “double-headed one person”, with both heads being humorous. “When we first played London, we got described as Steve Punt and his naughty friend,” he says. “So there are differences between us, and you don’t want to be exactly the same, do you?”

Writing as a partnership has become easier too. “The internet has changed everything. In this era of Skype, you don’t need to be in the same room now when you’re writing material,” says Hugh. “Mind you, with The Now Show, we start on the Tuesday each week and we’re recording on the Thursday, so you’re working to deadline and there’s not much time for arguing”.

As they close in on 30 years together, Punt & Dennis have called their latest touring show Ploughing On Regardless, accompanying it with a publicity photo of the duo up to their knees in water that could not be more apt, given the floods now dominating the news headlines, Hugh, however, is at pains to point at that was pure coincidence.

“We were amazed how prescient that title could be. The photo was taken in September, long before all this rain,” says Hugh. “I don’t know if it makes us look incredibly prescient or just incredibly smug.”

Ploughing On Regardless is a riff on the ubiquitous Keep Calm And Carry On mantra to be found on everything from tea towels to cushions. “I think you just have to keep on doing what you do,” says Hugh. “I don’t think you have much choice but to keep on going.”

Maybe not, but Hugh’s career path has involved good choices aplenty, from The Mary Whitehouse Experience and The Now Show to My Hero and Outnumbered. “That’s right but that’s where I think I’ve been very lucky. Pretty much everything I’ve done has been long-running: 43 series of The Now Show; nine years of Mock The Week; 52 episodes of My Hero,” he says.

“Early on, you don’t have choices. It’s just a case of those choices being lucky and working with people you like.”

As has been the case with Outnumbered, whose days on the Beeb are rumoured to be numbered, but maybe not. “I think this is now officially the last series, but I don’t think it will be the last you see of them; there will be specials to come,” says Hugh, who plays long-suffering dad Pete Brockman in the middle-class family sitcom.

“If this series were to be the last time I saw my pretend family, I would be very surprised.”

• Punt & Dennis, Ploughing On Regardless, Grand Opera House, York, Sunday, 7.30pm. Tickets update: still available on 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york