Les Dennis isn't normally a serious theatre actor, is he? Look beyond Celebrity Big Brother and his collapsed marriage, however, and there is much more to this TV comic, discovers CHARLES HUTCHINSON.

NO disrespect intended, but Les Dennis and Art are not normally to be found in the same sentence.

Les Dennis and Amanda Holden, no more please, yes. Les Dennis, Family Fortunes and popular entertainment, yes. Les Dennis and his former comedy partner, the late York-born impressionist Dustin Gee, yes. Les and yet more Amanda, yes, unfortunately. So, Les Dennis and Art, how come?

Next Friday, the Liverpudlian actor, comic, television presenter and tabloid fish food takes to the Harrogate Theatre stage for the opening night of a new national tour of Art, Yasmina Reza's award-laden comedy.

After Celebrity Big Brother, now it is celebrity big tour for Les, who is on the road with Dynasty handsome hound Christopher Cazenove and John Duttine, from To Serve Them All My Days.

"I was very lucky actually, because Art was a play I'd always wanted to do," says Les, on the phone line from rehearsals at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

"I'd seen it a couple of times, first at the Wyndham with the original cast of Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney and Ken Stott, and Ken blew me away. I thought to myself 'I'd like to do that role some time'."

He was, in his words, having a quiet summer this year when the chance came. New Harrogate Theatre artistic director Hannah Chissick sought his services in the cause of Art.

"Michael Harrison Productions, who are promoting the tour, asked my agent if they could send me the script. I didn't need to see a script; I already knew I wanted to do it! But the agent said 'Well, send it anyway'," he says.

In Reza's study of male friendship disintegrating after the purchase of an artwork, Les is to play Yvan, the tragi-comic Ken Stott role.

"Yvan's the guy who amuses Serge and Marc; they're three quite passionate men - they're French - and Yvan sees himself as the joker. That's his role; he's the 'placator', the 'intermediator', who will do what his friends want to please them.

"The thing that attracted me about Yvan was that Ken Stott wasn't that well known at the time; there he was with the great Finney and Courtenay, and he came on as this whirlwind, had a stream-of-consciousness rant, and he hooked you in."

As a performer, Les may be best known for light entertainment, Family Fortunes, Give Your Mate A Break and such like - before his purging experience on Celebrity Big Brother - but take a second look at his CV. Radio Four dramas; 1995 film debut in a Joe Orton-style black comedy, Intimate Relations, starring alongside Rupert Graves; pantomime and summer seasons; Brookside, Casualty, Crossroads, Merseybeat and Channel 4's Wyrd Sister on TV; West End musical theatre credits as Bill Snibson in Me And My Girl and, earlier this year, Amos Hart in Chicago; theatre work on tour in the comic romp Don't Dress For Dinner and Alan Ayckbourn's Just Between Ourselves.

As for serious theatre, it is impossible to be more serious than doing a David Hare play, as Les did, appearing in Skylight in Newbury, or touring Helsinki in the Finnish play Cherished Disappointments In Love with Janet Suzman.

Not bad for an actor with no formal training but knocked into shape on the toughest training ground of all - working men's clubs in Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester.

"I think each time I've done a play and done something that's seen as different - like when I did Misery at Oldham about 18 months ago - I just have to go through that thing of people saying 'After the first two minutes, you forget it's Les Dennis'.

"Now I feel that having done a lot of rep I'm playing with the big boys in the Premiership," he says.

How are rehearsals progressing with the 'big boys', Duttine and Cazenove?

"We're just getting on with rehearsing it. With the casting of Art, each time it's three new actors, and none of us has done it before, so you become a unit, and that's important in this play because you have to believe they have been friends for a long time."

That should make a change from celebrities pulling each other apart in Celebrity Big Brother. "You can never be sure how you'll get on when on tour for ten or 11 weeks but I think we're going to have a good time with it," says Les.

In his 49th year, that may well be his theme tune for the future: good plays, preferably one a year, good television work and hopefully good times.

After the Holden years, the tabloids still may be lurking, maybe smirking too, and only last Sunday, Les was pictured picking his nose, yet he is determined to look forward.

"I have to say that the coverage is quietening down for me, though I don't read the papers," he says. "I'm philosophical about it. It was part of my life, it's gone; I've moved on, and I'm just trying to get on with my life."

If he ordered a paper at a hotel, which would it be? "Certainly not the tabloids! It's The Times or the Guardian," he says. "Actually the Guardian got behind me on my stand-up tour last year, calling it the We Love Les Tour! But I'm not reading papers in general at the moment."

Equally, he has put Celebrity Big Brother to bed. "I wouldn't do it again but I have no regrets about it. It's one of those things you do once," he says.

Unlike theatre. "What I'd really love to do is create a role in a new play," he says.

In the meantime, he has arrived in Harrogate for his latest role, in Art, returning to the town where he recently filmed The Quest II with David Jason for Yorkshire Television.

"I'm playing this beauty-contest master of ceremonies, Johnny 'Mr Romance' Regal, who's like Mr Isle of Man, fixing the contests depending on who he fancies. He's a cheesy, charming, smiling viper: a nice character to play!"

It was good to hear Les Dennis laughing.

Art, Harrogate Theatre, September 12 to 27, box office 01423 502116; Hull New Theatre, October 20 to 25, 01482 226655.

Updated: 14:54 Friday, September 05, 2003