Gervase Phinn has built a remarkable new life from his years as a school inspector. The Yorkshire writer spins a few anecdotes with Charles Hutchinson.

THE flyleaf for Gervase Phinn's fourth autobiographical novel begins cheerily: "In Up And Down In The Dales life for the Inspector of English is always hectic".

It has just become even more hectic.

Phinn is the inspector of schools in Britain's biggest county who turned his hands to writing the memoirs that have made him "the James Herriot of schools".

He is also, draw breath, a teacher; freelance lecturer; children's poet; author of academic books and Puffin fiction; educational consultant; visiting professor of education; after-dinner speaker; radio and television personality; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Honorary Fellow of York St John College; and proud family man at his home near Doncaster.

His first children's novel, Dominic's Discovery, is published by Puffin this month, and now he is on a two-month tour with his evening entertainment, "sharing his hilarious tales of life as a schools inspector in the Yorkshire Dales", as the Grand Opera House brochure bumph for his appearance in York on April 18 puts it.

Busy, Gervase?

"I've just got back from Milan, where I went to the British School and some Milanese schools, and I was chatting with this little lad in the front row, who must have been six, and I said 'What's your name?' He said 'Versace'. I think Donatella is one of his aunts. It's like a different world!" he says, dropping into story-telling mode.

"My life has gone berserk. It's snowballed to such an extent that I've been to Dubai and the British School in Paris. I've come a long way from a council house in Rotherham."

He talks in a naturally anecdotal style, a style that can be enjoyed once more in Up And Down In The Dales, his latest instalment of Dales tales, published this week by Penguin.

Even now, he cannot quite believe that the first three in the series, The Other Side Of The Dale, Over Hill And Dale and Head Over Heels In The Dales, have sold 400,000 copies and a television series is being developed by Tiger Aspect Productions for the BBC.

"I'm surprised by their popularity because they're not deep stories, but now they're on a sixth-form English course, and these students will be reading all sorts of things into these light-hearted anecdotes, and I'm just a school teacher and inspector."

His success has been sudden but not overnight. "I've written 40 to 50 books, and I've been writing since I was 25, editing text books for children, academic books for children, with very limited prints, that weren't for WH Smith or Waterstone's and would go out of print after a few years," he says. "So this has been a new thing for me: the last one went to number one in the book charts.

"What's been marvellous is that my life has been a series of chances, such as four years ago when I was a passenger on a P&O Cruise, and this chap came over and recognised me somehow and said "I'm the agent for the theatre troupe on this cruise; would you like to do a week of shows on here?'. So I ended up doing five lectures on P&O posh cruises bound for South America."

The chances are that the agent will have seen Gervase on Esther Rantzen's afternoon chat show, Esther. The doyenne of daytime TV first encountered Gervase in 1997 when he did a talk for Esther's Childline Appeal.

"I'd always admired her, and after I went on her show three times, my life changed overnight. Penguin signed me for my first Dales book in 1998, and I got this really brilliant editor who had edited the James Herriot books and Dick Francis too, so I was really lucky there."

That word 'lucky' again. Gervase is self-deprecating, story after story.

"I did this talk at the Winding Wheel in Chesterfield, and I arrived thinking it would be a little hall but it was this huge hall with thousands of seats, and this woman came up and said 'Oh, I thought Gervase Phinn was a black soul singer who sang I Heard It Through The Grapevine'. 'Oh no,' I said, 'I'm a schools inspector'. 'Oh God,' she said, but there were 750 women there to see me."

Now he is to do 30 dates around the country, from Llandudno to Cheltenham to York. "I do a two-hour show, it's more stand-up style with anecdotes and stories. All innocent stuff, nothing vulgar, so children and old ladies can come along," he says.

No doubt there will be a clamour for another Dales book, but Gervase has a surprise in store.

"This one was really hard to write. I have about 40 notebooks of observations from 35 years in education, so I had a lot of material for the first book, and kept some back for the second, and they'd already signed me up for third.

"Now my worry with this one is that it's not as funny and maybe some of the stories aren't as amusing," he says. "So I can't see myself writing a fifth one unless I collect more anecdotes and stories."

That process is on-going: Gervase continues to take to his car to write down anecdotes, fresh in his memory, in his writer's pocketbook or page-a-day diary.

"I was in church last week," he says. "A girl went up to read the lesson and said 'This is a reading from the Book of Dermatology'."

Gervase hasn't Phinnished yet.

Up And Down In The Dales, Gervase Phinn, published in hardback by Penguin/Michael Joseph at £16.99.

Gervase Phinn, Grand Opera House, York, April 18, 7.30pm. Tickets: £8.50, £10.50, £12.50, on 0870 606 3595.

Updated: 08:43 Wednesday, March 31, 2004