Should you wish to succeed in the ol’ show business you have to be dogged, resolute and possibly mentally ill. Kirk Douglas said: “You must find something very hard to do and become extraordinarily good at it.” As a maxim ’tis truthful but hardly provides a shortcut. You have to become “extraordinarily good” at something — that takes bloody ages. You may have to endure poverty, hardship and hatred, but you can fulfil your dreams if you’re utterly determined.

I suppose that being an entertainer is vocational. George Bernard Shaw said: “The true artist will see his wife labour, his children toil and put his mum on the game rather than work at anything other than his art.” I’m paraphrasing but that was the gist, and it’s true. I signed on for years while mastering the art of “showing orf”.

I don’t have a wife or children but my Mum suffered a few years of terrible indignity so that I didn’t have to get a paper-round, not as a prostitute, though — she refused, which I thought was dashed selfish and it probably set me back a few months.

With me there seemed to be no other option: I had, and have, a pathological need to be a performer. The only place I feel safe to be myself is on stage.

As a child, I didn’t really consider performing. I wanted to be a footballer and it was only my wheezing, tubby, corpulent frame and a complete lack of talent that prevented this from happening, though it did facilitate my first “breakthrough”: when I was 15 I played Fat Sam in a school production of Bugsy Malone. I loved it. I felt as if I was being released from the agonising shackles of the quotidian to which I’d been tethered till then — none of which was in the script. T’were beautiful.

I was on stage, people were laughing at me. The things that up to then had seemed like handicaps (not fitting in, my desire for attention) were suddenly advantageous. I remember thinking, “At last, thank God.”

Then I was struck by an epiphany, and a custard pie, but the epiphany stayed with me — “I could do this for ever.”

I signed up to agencies that got parts for extras and auditioned for the “nancy-boy haven” Italia Conti stage school. I got in. I left home and became involved with a whole new group of people. I shed my past like a serpent with a skin of shame. I hated ballet and singing but the acting and improvisation lessons were a lark.

I remember us being told about the “apprenticeship” served in Chinese theatre, where you spent eight years sweeping the stage and preparing costumes. I thought, “F*** that,” but my own apprenticeship has taken twice that time.

Perhaps it seems as if I’ve turned up out of nowhere with odd hair and daft leggings, like a scarecrow who’s robbed a bondage emporium, but I have done hundreds of hours of stand-up, telly, radio and acting.

I’ve found the process frustrating and long. Long. Loooooooong. When I was 16 I thought I was going to be famous immediately. I thought I’d have limos picking me up and I’d be a teen sensation in Hollywood. When I left drama school at 22 I thought, “It’ll be now”, then at 25 when I was on MTV, I thought, “It’ll happen now.”

The important thing, I suppose, is that at all these junctures when something could have happened but didn’t, I persisted. I suppose that opportunities are inevitable, you just have to be ready for them.

My salvation has been stand-up comedy. It gives you some degree of autonomy instead of nervously waiting for the phone to ring. It got me used to being in front of an audience. I was rubbish at first, then arrogant, then drunk, then absolutely awful. I was a spectacular failure. I began to “experiment” by smashing up dead animals on stage while screaming for revolution through an opiated haze. This too, strangely, failed to bring success.