How long can Graham Fellows keep earning his living like this? It’s now some 20 years since he first slicked back his hair and donned rollneck and slacks to play John Shuttleworth, a prematurely retired Sheffield security guard hell-bent on a new life as a singer-songwriter. John is a great joke, but the way he’s been kept alive for so long must surprise even him.

Occasionally, over those years, Shuttleworth’s hopeless hopefulness has dragged his creator down into being listless rather than playing listless. But this latest touring show, With My Condiments, is dished out with rejuvenated aplomb.

That much is clear the moment Fellows takes the stage as his supporting character, the nouveau riche concreter and would-be after-dinner speaker Dave Tordoff. Tordoff’s luxury lifestyle in a ranch-style property outside Goole has never before been animated with quite such an engagingly dead hand. He’s a bore, but he’s a charismatic bore.

And while Shuttleworth’s existence is getting no more high-flung – his great woe is having two tubs of margarine on the go at once; his sole agent, the awful Ken Worthington, can’t make the show because he’s got the runs after making himself a curry – his commitment to his craft never wavers.

John is out to do a show around a culinary theme, but he can’t even succeed in that – his wife is too busy looking after Ken to help him, and health and safety means that he can’t do any cooking live on stage. What John can do is get behind his keyboard and throw in some culinary new numbers, best of which is I’m a Serial Cereal Eater – “you can punch the air to this one!” – alongside old numbers such as the power ballad Can’t Go Back to Savoury Now and the confectionary call-to-arms Mutiny on the Bounty Bar.

The shtick is old but the nuances are new. John chronicles innovations such as “garlic mushrooms” and “the new dips that are available – huummos”, greeting each such impostor with cautious antagonism. He mourns the decline of crab paste and potted meat, while pumping out songs of skill but no more pertinence. “Recalls the great days of Rick Astley, this one, doesn’t it?” he says, biffing out another anthem to the ordinary.

Fellows never sneers. That’s how he sustains the gag. He loves his characters because, like him, they’re so sincere about trying to be what they’re not. Tordoff will never be a “five-k-a-night” after-dinner speaker. Shuttleworth will never have a hit (or even a real friend). But there’s something endlessly inviting about seeing him parading his hobby horses as if they were thoroughbreds.

Another year, another show, another gloriously funny celebration of futility and frailty.

On tour. Next show tonight at Leeds City Varieties (08456 441881). www.shuttleworths.co.uk

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