Robert Webb talks to CHARLES HUTCHINSON about how much he’s looking forward to his latest role and also explains how hit sitcom Peep Show has remained so popular as it heads into its ninth and final series.

ROBERT Webb and David Mitchell toured Harrogate Theatre all of 20 years ago in their Cambridge Footlights student days.

The duo are still going strong as ageing flatmates in Channel 4's Peep Show, but Webb will be returning to Harrogate in another comic partnership next month, playing the effervescent, aristocratic Bertie Wooster to Jason Thorpe's dutiful valet Jeeves in Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense.

"My first time in Harrogate was 1994 with the Footlights. Various names that year, but mainly me," Robert recalls. "The year after it was David and me and we were at Harrogate Theatre for three nights. It was a lovely place to play."

Last year, Robert appeared in Perfect Nonsense in the West End, joined by Mark Heap and Mark Hadfield at the Duke of York's Theatre.

"I played Bertie there in March, April and May and we had a fantastic time," he says. "Another cast toured the play later last year and then it's been all change again from the beginning of January, when I joined the tour.

"I finished in Tim Firth's play Neville's Island on January 3; that was also at the Duke of York's, but they put in a different dressing room or I would have gone mad."

Robert is on the road with Thorpe's Jeeves and former The Young Ones straight guy Chris Ryan in the role of Seppings in the Goodale Brothers' new play, adapted from the works of P.G. Wodehouse.

"They first did a version about 20 years ago, when it was a two-man show, and last year Bobby [Robert] Goodale played one of the characters [Seppings] on the tour, now it's a three-man show."

Was Robert nervous about playing Bertie for the first time last March?

"Not to sound conceited, but I didn't worry because the script is so wonderful and Bertie is in a world of his own," he says. "It doesn't really bear much relation to the Fry and Laurie television series because it's a fast-paced, theatrical performance. If you did it like this on TV it would look insane. For once in my life I'm not borrowing from Hugh Laurie."

The play is essentially an adaptation of Wodehouse's The Code Of The Woosters, in which a country house weekend takes a turn for the worse, when Bertie Wooster is unwittingly called on to play matchmaker, but also to steal a silver cow creamer from Totleigh Towers.

Naturally, the ever-dependable Jeeves is there to prevent Bertie from making a fool of himself in front of a cast of Wodehouse’s finest characters: Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, Sir Watkin Bassett, Dahlia Travers, Roderick Spode and Constable Oates.

"The premise of the play is that it's Bertie's show. He's invited the audience because a friend has told him to put on a show; Bertie makes Jeeves do half the characters and Seppings do the other half a dozen characters," says Robert. "Jeeves has to keep everything afloat of course."

And what do you do?

"I just stand on stage shouting and running. The fitness to play it forces itself on you; you're pretty much match fit from the rehearsals," he says.

Perfect Nonsense is directed by Sean Foley, once one half of the comedy double act The Right Size, best known for their show The Play What I Wrote. "Sean instinctively knows which button to press to make the audience laugh and he knows where the audience will be looking for a laugh," he says.

Such judgement adds to the joy of playing Bertie. "Wooster's just a lovable duffer, isn't he. He's very benign, optimistic, and he's either constantly delighted or terrified, and if he can manage not to get married, then his life is delightful," says Robert. "He gets into scrapes but his demigod-like valet can get him out of everything."

Meanwhile, Webb and Mitchell, Harrogate stage partners fully two decades ago when college chums, will be re-uniting later this year for the denouement of Peep Show and its flat-sharing, socially dysfunctional former college chums in Croydon.

"I could never have envisaged it running for nine series," he concedes after 12 years as Jeremy "Jez" Usborne.

"But it's returning for the ninth and last series, which is being written and recorded in July and August and will be going out in November and December.

"It's sustained as a show because Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong write it very skilfully, very carefully, with all the classic elements of sitcom, the characters stuck in one place, and the audience hears them thinking aloud, so you get two levels of laughter, which makes it very rude as well."

Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense is on tour at Harrogate Theatre, February 23 to 28, and Leeds Grand Theatre, June 1 to 7. Box office: Harrogate, 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk; Leeds, 0844 848 2700 or leedsgrandtheatre.com