SARDONIC southerner Arthur Smith may be at the veteran stage of his career in curmudgeonly comedy, but he has performed just the once in York...at a school.

"I like York, it's a lovely place, but I think I've only ever played it once in my life when I did a benefit gig because I've got family there. It was a show at St Wilfrid's Primary School, must be about four or five years ago, and I had a splendid time," says the 61-year-old London wit, raconteur, playwright, presenter and panellist, ahead of his return to the city to play a York Literature Festival gig tomorrow at the Grand Opera House.

"Mind you, I'm prone to winding up the Yorkshire audiences, especially the posh ones, in Harrogate, where you get the most reaction!"

Arthur is best known as one of the Grumpy Old Men off the telly, and the grumpiness shows no sign of abating as he observes the irritations of modern life as wryly as ever.

"I'm a bit of a grammarian," he says. "So I'm pleased they're trying to get rid of exclamation marks in schools [in the Government's new grammar guidelines for seven year olds], but if sentences ending with an exclamation mark will only be marked as correct if they start with either 'How' or 'What', exclamation marks should definitely be allowed with 'Ow' too," he says. "And surely not all 'how' questions need an exclamation mark?"

Arthur is not exactly chuffed at what he perceives as the rise in people "of age and education doing that upward thing at the end of a sentence". "It's as if they're always ending it with a question," he says.

He cherishes the endangered species otherwise known as the semi-colon. "The semi-colon is a subtle thing, joining sentences that don't warrant a full stop, so it's bringing things together, which is surely good thing," he reasons.

While on the subject of "bringing things together", where does Arthur stand on Brexit? In or out of Europe? "By and large, I'm a 'let's stay in' man, partly because my dad was a prisoner of war at Colditz and I took him back there, and he always made a point of saying hello to the Germans as he felt that might prevent another war," he says. "He felt unity was better than nations and their obsessions."

Arthur has embraced the age of Twitter, being wont to use it for pithily witty thoughts. "Previously I would have written gags in notepads, that I would either then lose or I'd later fail to interpret what it meant at the time of writing it down, but most things you can fit into 140 characters on Twitter, though I don't get involved in conversations and spats," he says.

"It's more of a chance to tell gags or to publicise things. I'm certainly not going to be posting pictures of my lunch; that's more for the 'Me' generation, always going about on yourself and taking selfies.

"I deliberately have the worst phone. I can't go on the internet; I can't take pictures; I can only send texts...which makes it harder for the FBI to track me down."

A pinch of salt should probably be taken at this point, but has Arthur ever been phone-tapped? "No, I don't think so. Pleasingly, I'm not quite at the level that the tabloids would be interested in me, or I'm too old, too ugly, for them to do that to me."

York Press: Arthur Smith. (36720585)

Arthur Smith: soon to appear in Are You Being Served

Arthur is to appear later this year in a BBC pilot one-off re-make of the department store sitcom Are You Being Served, playing Arthur English's character, the janitor Mr Harman. "I didn't know Arthur English but funnily enough his daughter turned up and she was lovely," he says.

"I was also asked to be in the stage version of Mrs Henderson Presents; they wanted a character who was a cross between Max Miller and Arthur English, which made me wonder if I must be turning into Arthur.

"They said I'd got the part but then they never contacted me again, though I would probably have turned it down. I'm a comedian; I can't do matinees. I do my office hours from 4pm to 2am and that's one of the reasons for being a comedian."

Arthur Smith is "an owl, not a lark". "My theory is that the larks got into the office on the first day and set the office hours as nine to five, before the owls even had a chance to vote on it."

You might expect a grump to have two wrong sides of the bed from which to emerge each day, but not so. Arthur has good and bad days, like everyone else. "Sometimes you wake up and you don't even know what species you are and it takes ages to work out what you're doing, but today [Thursday this week] is a good one. I'm having a meeting about doing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe called Mindlessness For Beginners."

At present, Mindlessness For Beginners finds Arthur taking on the voiceover guise of Daphne Fairfax for soothing, even soporific online guides to such activities as sock stroking, colouring and towel folding, all of which can be found on the internet. Now he must think of how to develop the format for a Fringe show.

Meanwhile, what positive thoughts can Grumpy Old Arthur offer on the eve of his York visit? "Well, we're all still alive and I'm coming to the York Literature Festival.

Arthur Smith appears at York Literature Festival, Grand Opera House, York, tomorrow, 7.30pm, supported by writer, Private Eye cartoonist and performer Mike Barfield; box office, 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york. Visit yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk to download the full festival programme.