Not that the medical expertise has been wasted.

Last year's Dave Spikey Best Medicine Tour is now back as - The Best Medicine Tour: Repeat Prescription!

But this time around, he'll also be treating his audiences to his merciless dissection of local newspapers.

TV audiences probably first knew Dave best as a co-writer and co-star in Phoenix Nights with Peter Kay - Dave playing put-upon turn Jerry St Clair.

Dave then spent four seasons as one of the team captains on Channel 4 panel game 8 Out Of 10 Cats with Jimmy Carr.

But his love of newspaper life hit TV screens in 2005 when he wrote and starred in Dead Man Weds, a six-part comedy for ITV.

And now his light-hearted look at newspaper stories and their sometimes misleading headlines has just been published in his first book He Took My Kidney Then Broke My Heart.

"The first thing I do when I get onstage is to have a look at the local papers and see what's happening!

"People love it when I point things out from an outsider's point of view. Quite early on in the original Best Medicine tour, I realised it would be the basis for another tour and I started to collect pieces out of the papers wherever I went.

"I was doing a gig in London and a publisher was in the audience and contacted me later to suggest it might make a great book!"

And you get the feeling that Dave is restless if he has to be idle.

"I don't like having days off," he confessed. "I have a couple of TV things in the pipeline and I've got a commission for a theatre script for the Octagon Theatre in Bolton. I'm writing a comedy about a Sunday football team and I'm writing the story of my life, though I'm making some of it up - so I'm calling it my 'sortaboiography'!"

Dave Spikey.

Though Bolton isn't close to the sea, it was there Dave ended up following a whim to learn to sail.

He laughed: "I've lived in Bolton all my life, but I decided I wanted to learn to sail properly after going on a holiday in Greece with some friends on a short sailing course.

"I came home and found out about a year-long course I could do so that I could learn to sail my own boat, and it turned out it was run by the Royal Yachting Association - in Bolton! Now for our family holidays, we get a yacht and sail around the Greek islands. And I was asked to sail around the Isle Of Wight for a prostate cancer charity as one of 1500 yachts - so that was scary. but we came 450th, so that was great!"

Dave has been a vegetarian for over 25 years and also campaigns for animal welfare.

"What do you call a vegetarian who eats fish - a hypocrite," he joked.

He recalled being taken to markets in the Far East where four foot tall crates were just stuffed with live cats and dogs. Dave most recently went to China to work with a charity trying to free bears being kept in tiny cages because their bile is seen as a great medicinal aid for everything from piles to high temperature.

"How can the bile do both those things. Here's a tip - paracetemol and Preparation H. The only way the attitude to bears will change is if the younger generations get the message out there that bear bile isn't the answer. I work with a charity out there and was asked to go out to choose which two bears would be freed from a farm. Two years ago we paid for two to be freed, and they're still not free."

Though he's happy to travel - his current tour has been 80 dates long - Dave likes nothing better than returning home to Lancashire.

"London agents have said to me 'The opportunities are down here'. But I wouldn't want to go and live there. I'm a homebird and I've lived in this little village just outside Bolton for 25 years and all my mates are here. And the main problem if I moved away is that I get all my comedy from real life observations. All I need to do is go to the pub at home and find inspiration!"

* Dave Spikey's Best Medicine: Repeat Prescription is at Eden Court, Inverness next Thursday.

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