Joan Rivers has waited until she's 70 to tour Britain. Charles Hutchinson asks:

what took you so long, Joan?

PLENTY of overdressed, surgery-enhanced, wealthy American women sally forth on their first grand tour of Britain at 70. Yet you would not expect Joan Rivers, America's First Lady of Comedy, to be among that number.

Surprisingly, her six Broke And Alone dates this month - including the Grand Opera House in York on Monday - will be her first national UK tour.

"Isn't it amazing?" she says. Indeed it is Joan, what took you so long? "No one asked me before.

"I think I first had to go to the West End and do well there... I'm very scared to..." You, feisty Joan Rivers, bitch queen of the put-down, scared? Surely, people are more scared of you and your viperish tongue?

"Well, they should be more scared of me," she says, laughing, before returning to her original line of thought. "I did Australia five years ago, then the Edinburgh Festival and the West End in 2002, and now I'm doing this tour. I'm so excited. It's fabulous. I'm so looking forward to it."

The New Yorker will not be tailoring her material for old York, or researching York's past and present for some early point scoring.

"No, you don't do that. I think that's such a cheat when you don't know about what's going on in York," she says, on the phone from the Big Apple.

"It's very much a one-world place. Anything in New York will work in York or London: if it's a national thing, people will understand. We all see the same news, the same movies."

Her stand-up show is always evolving. "Updating happens every night, and the fun is the ad-libbing part. You never know what will happen, or who might be in the front row. It's not that I bait them; you just hope there are some gay men there," Joan says.

"They're the best audiences; they're the funniest; they're the ones that found Liza Minnelli; the ones that found Bette Midler; and they're the ones that found me."

The pink-pound cognoscenti love the over-the-top glamour of a Liza, Bette or Joan, and while Rivers may jokingly call her tour Broke And Alone, she is looking a million dollars - although I didn't ask her how much she had paid her plastic surgeon - in her 71st year.

She demurs. "If comediennes were beautiful, they wouldn't be doing jokes. Name me the last supermodel who had a great sense of humour. When you're that gorgeous, just stand!"

Her need to express herself, to rant until the grave, came from a familiar resource. "I just think it's that thing of being an outsider; it's about feeling alienated, and that's wonderful. It's born in you; it's in your DNA. In the same way, you can't teach people to act, to be a great painter," she says.

That desire to rant is unabated, even if the tour originally had the valedictory-sounding title of Before They Pull The Plug. "We decided it would be very confusing to use that because this tour is an extension of the Broke And Alone show I did in the West End, but Before They Pull The Plug is a great title, so we'll save that for the next tour in two years' time," she says.

Did you read that your fellow plastic-fantastic, Cher, had retired from touring, Joan? "It makes me laugh Cher calling it a farewell tour. It started when Nero waved her goodbye.

"I've never said I'm leaving. You will find me dead on stage. How lucky am I to earn a living in the business I love. I love writing. I love performing. I love editing," says Joan.

The work continues to pile up. A month ago, she was the inaugural guest on the new BBC1 series Jack Dee Live At Apollo and this summer you may have spotted a computer-generated version of Joan Rivers being catty on the catwalk in Shrek 2.

"I just thought it would be so much fun to do - and be in a hit movie. It was nothing to do with me, but I thought I looked hot on screen!" she says.

Her new agony-aunt series on Five, The Joan Rivers Position, begins on Sunday at 11.05pm. "People will come to me with their problems and I'll tell them what to do. They've found me an 82-year-old lady who's addicted to porn," Joan says.

Will you be a polite agony aunt? "No, I won't be. Look, it's 11 o'clock at night."

Joan is not afraid to insult anyone: "If someone needs to be insulted, I will insult them. If something is wrong, I will say it; if someone is looking like an idiot or behaving like an idiot, then I will say something."

Politics and politicians are not top of her agenda. "I'm very careful with politics because I never understand them. I go after things I understand: human conditions, human mores."

Joan did, however, land in hot water for saying "I hope it goes down, it's so ugly" after an attempt to bomb the Citigroup building. "It's the ugliest building in New York, and I said in my act I would help the terrorists blow it up, and people laughed, but then it got taken out of context. I just thought, oh go on, find the terrorists rather than worry about me," she recalls.

Even when being briefly serious, she can't stop the quips: "I always say Jewish women will never make a terrorist bomber, because they're always worried 'Does the bomb make me look fat?'."

Thoughts turn again to her tour, on which she will be 'chaperoned' by the debonair Kit and The Widow, the gentlemanly English satirists with a wit as dry as the best Martini. Their repertoire includes a waspish song at the expense of Joan and her plastic surgery.

"I think that song's hilarious," she says. Ah yes, but will be singing with them?

"If I could sing, darling, I would own the world."

Joan Rivers, Broke And Alone, with Kit and The Widow, Grand Opera House, York, Monday, 8pm. Tickets update: still available at £20, £25 and £27.50 on 0870 606 3595. Her new television chat show, The Joan Rivers Position, starts on Five on Sunday.

Updated: 16:00 Thursday, October 07, 2004