Stephen K Amos talks to Viv Hardwick about the schoolboy diary which has helped him create a comedy tour and his hopes for a new series on BBC.

DOES black comedian Stephen K Amos have an unfair advantage over his white brethren on the stand-up circuit having previously teased his audiences about a gorilla joke which he could tell and they couldn’t?

“It’s kind of pay-back time for all the years of growing up in the Seventies and Eighties when there were lots of non- PC jokes about people who didn’t really have a voice I suppose.

Now, in my pocket I’ve got a race card and, you know what, I can use it whenever I want to,” he jokes.

There is a serious side with TV personalities being sacked for making racist or sexist comments off-air and I ask if this might impact on comedy routines. Amos says: “It does worry me. Everything I say on stage or behind the scenes I would be prepared to stand up and back. I’m not afraid to say what I genuinely believe. If the intent is absolutely clear then there’s no grey area. I don’t think Andy Gray would have gone purely based on his initial comments. It’s the footage of him making suggestions to a female co-host that was a bit too much. I know of at least two comics who behave outrageously in the guise of comedy, and if word got out about their behaviour it wouldn’t be deemed to be acceptable either.

“If I say the n-word on stage then the intent for me is clear in that I’m being ironic or making a real point, but to hear someone like Ron Atkinson use that word off-air to describe something he wouldn’t say on-air, then you have to ask why.”

Amos is aware that a lot of comedy is now being watered down to avoid offending people, but hopes that common sense will prevail and an audience be allowed to make up its own mind.

“I’m all for freedom of speech and we shouldn’t lose that privilege we’ve got. My own BBC2 series (The Stephen K Amos Show) went out on 10pm on a Friday and I was told it was going out before the watershed.

So we wrote a show with that in mind, so much so that a couple of times when the F-word was used it was bleeped out. Then it went out at 10pm with the F-word bleeped out and it was a different show.

“Thank God it was a good learning curve for me and I could introduce guests who were a bit quirky. Hopefully, we will hear this week if the BBC will give us another series that we can change.” Amos, who tries to avoid foul language in his current touring show The Best Medicine, says he was aiming for a Dave Allen Show approach of gentle humour and fast-paced sketches.

“It may be different next time,” he adds.

With a tour taking in Middlesbrough, next week, and then Newcastle, Hartlepool, Harrogate and York, I ask him about his schoolboy diaries which feature strongly in the act.

“I kept a diary for a long time and it’s usually during the moments in my life I was searching for something or in despair.

The weird thing is that now I can look back and laugh because these things don’t matter now,” says Amos. He reveals that his diary actually came to the rescue when he missed his twin sister’s wedding after agreeing to be best man.

“I’d been working incredibly hard on my TV series and I slept through my alarm. I missed the wedding and got to the reception just in time to hear my mum reading out bits from my 1982 diary, much to the hilarity of everyone in the room. I was mortified because it was the one thing that my sister had asked me to do over all these years and then, because of a faulty alarm, I had a hilarious journey trying to get there,” he says.

Asked about other diary highlights he picks out the time his granny upset him by appearing to put vegetables into a fruit salad.

“Another example was my mum buying me cheap trainers (they were £3 Abibas rather than £50 Adidas) and that led to me actually hating my parents.

I felt it was their fault that I was subjected to bullying at school because I had cheap trainers,” he says.

So how does he keep himself in shape for his 69-date tour, which is into its second month? “I did that hideous thing of telling myself that I must join a gym. So I joined a gym in the first week of January and I haven’t been. It’s extraordinary… so I’m relying on vitamins and the fact that I can sleep.”

During a tour, Amos constantly revises and changes material with the intention of creating a new show towards the end. “I try and do a new show every year because any stuff I put out on DVD I shouldn’t be doing live on the circuit.

Although I did do a show in Edinburgh last year and as I finished someone shouted out ‘do so and so joke’ and I said ‘No, I’m not a jukebox’ but I did the joke. Then it was a Spartacus moment where I got asked to lots of my old jokes… and, like a whore, I responded by doing the joke.

“It was surreal moment and I got another 25 minutes and everyone was loving it.”

* Stephen K Amos, Tuesday, Middlesbrough Town Hall, Tickets: £17. Box Office: 01642-729729. March 16, Newcastle City Hall. May 3, Hartlepool Borough Hall.

May 7, Harrogate International Centre. May 8, York Grand Opera House