JEREMY Hardy will be performing in Salisbury on Wednesday, returning to the city for the first time in years.

The comedian, whose show, Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, has run for ten series on Radio 4, is also a regular on Radio 4’s The News Quiz and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

Hardy, who has been performing stand-up for the last 32 years, will be talking about food, death, life, politics, class and identity.

“It’s a fairly scattergun approach,” he said. “They’re just things I’m interested in - I don’t watch much television or sport so those things don’t feature. I keep up-to-date with news and every so often I’ll make myself sit down, write and think of things. Sometimes I’ll junk lots of material and start anew which is pretty torturous.

“I never really stop touring. I had August off but that was it for this year so the show evolves all the time, I’m always fiddling around, it’s never finished.”

In terms of how his stand-up material has changed over the three decades, he says it has become more reflective. “You get old and people die and you become a parent, children grow up - my daughter is 25, my mum is dead, my father is hanging in there and I’m in the back half of my life,” he said.

“You become a bit more reflective as you get older, a bit more circumspect. When you start out, you’re young and brash and impressed at the sound of your own voice, you think you’re the first one to think of things. As you get older you think more about what you are going to say.

“There are a lot of things that didn’t exist when I started out. There was no internet, no computers in homes, we didn’t have mobile phones.

“Life has changed enormously, the world is quite a different place. People’s attention span is quite a lot shorter and you have to work harder to get people to focus.

“People are used to looking at a phone screen, and flicking it around, feeding off that stimuli - you overcome that on stage by sheer grit and determination.

“I try and follow themes to have some sort of flue line which make people have to concentrate - it’s not choc full of disconnected one liners. I try and follow ideas through to some sort of conclusion. People have heard me on the radio but that’s quite heavily edited, my stand up is different.”

Asked what he enjoys most about performing, he said: “I suppose I must be a show-off really because I keep doing it.

“It’s nice that I still get new people coming along - often half the people in the audience are new. I don’t know why they come but that’s rewarding. When you get young people, no disrespect to older people, that’s great. I’m looking forward to being in Salisbury, I haven’t performed there for a long, long time.”

For tickets visit salisburyartscentre.co.uk or call 01722 321744