I'm the sort of person that gets his phone out as soon as the adverts come on so I was taken by surprise when I was watching I'm a Celebrity last night and I suddenly heard Peter Kay talking about his new tour and buying a new roll of carpet for his mum's bungalow. I looked up and saw that Kay had just bought TV space to announce his first tour following the cancellation of his mega tour in 2018.

 

This was clearly big news but I didn't anticipate how big. I ran a story immediately on beyondthejoke which went viral, and it then appeared on the BBC news and in all the major national newspapers. At the moment there aren't even any dates in London announced – I'm sure there will be at some point – but the media saw this as a massive news event, his first tour since the record-breaking 2010 show The Tour That Doesn't Tour Tour...Now On Tour, which held the Guinness World Record for the biggest selling run of all time, playing to more than 1.2 million people. This show currently has 22 dates from December 2022 to July 2023 but surely more will come.

 

Part of the reason for the press excitement is that there is still a mystery over why his eleven month 2018/2019 tour was abruptly cancelled. Inevitably various rumours floated around but there was never a full explanation. I would be surprised if there was one now. Instead Kay has kept a pretty low profile since then, made even lower by the pandemic. He reappeared to DJ at his Dance For Life disco events but until earlier this year when rumours of a comeback started there was no sign of a return to stand-up for the Phoenix Nights star.

 

It will be interesting to see Kay back on the road again. He was the biggest comedian in the UK when he last toured twelve years ago and he paved the way for the likes of Michael McIntyre, John Bishop and Micky Flanagan. They all trade in a similar brand of mainstream, accessible, relatable observational humour, though maybe are lighter on the nostalgia than Kay, with his riffs about growing up with supermarket own brand Cola and impersonations of children dancing at family weddings.

 

In some ways Kay, now 49, was a throwback when he started out in the 1990s. He seemed old even when he was a newcomer. He talked about the past and looked more like an old school comedian or a character from Coronation Street than a cool jeans-wearing hipster comic. He was not the sort of comic that would appear on stage in a tatty T shirt with a picture of their favourite indie band on the front. And now Kay has been away for so long he feels a bit like a nostalgia act himself.

 

The world, of course, has changed since Kay last toured, but I can't see him changing. I can't see him shouting out "sourdough" instead of "garlic bread". Will he be making jokes about Tiktok and Elon Musk? And while Kay is unashamedly old-fashioned and old school I don't think there is much in his past that might get him cancelled. He has rarely been a controversial stand-up. The woke warrior brigade would be wasting their time trawling through his Twitter timeline for incriminating gags. I'm not even sure if Kay puts the posts on his Twitter feed himself – he is so old school he is the only comedian I know whose Twitter handle is his website address.

 

Classic Peter Kay Christmas Cracker-style jokes:

 

“You never know where to look when eating a banana.”

“Why does mineral water that ‘has trickled through mountains for centuries’ have a ‘use by’ date?”

“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realised that The Lord doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me.”

“A friend of mine got knocked down by a mobile library. He was lying in the road screaming and the driver got out and said, ‘Shh!'”

“So a lorry-load of tortoises crashed into a trainload of terrapins, I thought, ‘That’s a turtle disaster.'”