High-pitched fun with Joe

His new tour is called Pull My Finger and he says there are plenty of new routines, including one called Cheese Corner.

Joe said: “I found a piece of music on iTunes called Where’s The Cheese Gone?, and built a routine around it, in which I put on a hat that looks like it’s made of cheese, play the drums to the song (bear with me) and try and do as many jokes about cheese as I can.”

“At the end of the first half, I’ll have a Cheese Box at the front of the stage and people can put their own cheese jokes in it and have them read out in the second half. If you get your joke read out, you get a Dairylea triangle. But I won’t be giving them away lightly.”

He will be including some Pasquale favourites as well though.

“Well, comics can be like bands - when you go and see a band and they play all their new album and not stuff you really like, you come away disappointed,” he said.

“It can be the same with comedy; people say ‘Aren’t you doing any magic this year?’, or ‘Aren’t you doing that routine?’ or ‘I loved it when you used to sing that song’, so this year there’ll be a bit of stuff that people are familiar with.”

“I’ll be doing a painting as I always do on the shows on tour - it’s on the theme of madness, and the background music to it is Windmills Of Your Mind, the lyrics of which makes no sense at all, do they?”

It’s a family shows and Joe has found found that his audiences are sometimes getting younger.

He said: “Well, you do go to some places and see signs on roundabouts that say ‘Happy 30th birthday, Grandma’ these days.”

“But I have found that people who came to see me when they were kids are now bringing their own children, which can be quite disconcerting.”

Being crowned King of the Jungle in 2004 has had a cathartic effect on his lifestyle and has seen him go on to overcome a deep-seated fear of flying and qualify as a pilot; fulfill a lifetime ambition to revisit his education and start studying with the Open University for a Degree in Geoscience; take up boxing and then take up marathon running. He ran the London Marathon this year, completing the course in five hours 22 minutes – no mean achievement for a man whose only experience of running had been from one side of the stage to the other during his action-packed performances.

The show starts at 7.30pm and tickets are priced £17. To book call the Majestic Threatre on 01777 706866 or go to the website at www.majesticretford.com.