MIKE Harding, the “grandfather of alternative comedy” and BBC Radio 2 folk show presenter, has decided to start touring again after 15 years. Not surprisingly, tonight’s 7.30pm performance at Pocklington Arts Centre has sold out.

“I did a couple of gigs last September to October and I just enjoyed it so much I thought I’d go back out on the tour again,” says the one-time Rochdale Cowboy.

“It’s a 15-year gap, but it wasn’t a conscious choice not to do any more. But we used to do 82-night tours with nine roadies and two articulated lorries and did 2,000-seater theatres and I started to go to the Himalayas, climbing and walking, and spent three months in Pakistan and Nepal. You had to sit down and plan a big tour like I was doing and I just didn’t get around to it. I said ‘I’ll have a think about it next month’ and I didn’t.

“Then, doing a couple of little local gigs, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to tour with nine roadies and two lorries. I could just go out with the guitar in the back of the car and turn up to a gig with a suitcase and a box of CDs. That’s what I’m doing.”

Hence the tour’s title of Me, A Guitar And Some Daft Stuff, a show in which he “returns to his roots with a vengeance”, drawing on more than 40 years of material to lead the audience into his comic world of stories and songs.

Now living in Settle, he has settled on a touring schedule where the furthest north he goes will be South Shields, the furthest south, Derby. “I wanted to do tiny little theatres in the north that were between 200 to 300 seats,” says Mike. “I’m only doing it because I enjoy it, it’s not because the taxman is breathing down my neck. Most are in Yorkshire and Lancashire”

At 66, he is adamant he will never resume full-scale touring.

“I’ll probably do something in the autumn and another 20 nights the following spring,” he says.

“I’ve never had an agent or a manager, so in the past I did it all from a small office in Manchester. Now it’s all organised from my house. The lovely thing about being a small outfit is that you have a great atmosphere in a place to begin with.

The best-designed arts centres are like old theatres.

“On my last big tour I said ‘no leisure centres’ because they still smell of sweat and French chalk and the dressing room is a locker room. The architects should be taken out and flogged to death with a sweaty sock full of diarrhoea.”