He's played ageing touring rocker Derek Smalls, America's most infamous president and the yellow embodiment of neighbourliness in long-running cartoon series The Simpsons.

But there's one show Harry Shearer knows he never wants to be a part of – Strictly Come Dancing.

“I will never be on Strictly Come Dancing,” he says. “Never, never. That's three nevers.”

This vehement refusal to dance comes from the training Shearer and Daytona co-star Maureen Lipman have endured. The pair play amateur ballroom dancers Joe and Elli living in a 1980s Brooklyn apartment whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of a estranged relative.

“I have never been a dancer,” says Shearer from his New Orleans home. “They brought in this remarkable guy, Matt Flint from Strictly, who said to me: ‘You're going to learn to do this, and learn to enjoy it’. Damn me he was right on both counts...”

The dancing provides a key emotional moment in the show which is the first live theatre role Shearer has taken in 20 years.

Daytona was penned by co-star Oliver Cotton who plays Joe's long lost brother Billy.

It began in the intimate confines of London's Park Theatre last year before a national tour culminating in the West End's Haymarket Theatre.

“We had rehearsed for four weeks on a horizontal floor, and when we came to the Haymarket it had a serious rake,” remembers Shearer. “All the muscle memory we had done for the dancing had to be thrown out...”

Reading the script he felt an affinity to the characters forced to leave their homes after the Nazi occupation.

“Their experiences resonated very strongly with the experiences of my parents,” says Shearer. “They came from the same part of Europe, they had to make the same psychological adjustments.”

He sees the characters starting new lives in America as part of the nation's psyche.

“The social religion of the US is personal self-reinvention,” he says. “We are so very accustomed to the idea of people who have had tragic experiences creating second or even third lives.”

In terms of building up the relationship between himself and Lipman, Shearer says it was all there in the script.

“There were no exercises or camping trips,” he says. “We have a long and quite profound scene in Act One where it is just the two of us on stage – it's a lot of time together.

“One of the delights of doing the play is we keep finding new stuff. It's not like doing the same performance every night.”

Daytona covers some dark subject matter, but both Shearer and Lipman are better known for their comic talents.

“I think to get an audience to buy a comic premise you have to be a pretty good actor,” says Shearer.

“In comedy there is often a sense of the absurd involved, and you have to perform the absurdity otherwise it's not watchable. Maureen and I know there are laughs in this show, and we are serious in trying to get every one of those laughs out of it.”

Daytona is just the latest twists in Shearer's career. He first attained cult hero status as the courgette-sporting rocker Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap – a role he has revived numerous times since, most recently in 2009.

“Nobody ever said it's not fun to play loud music in silly clothes,” says Shearer.

“It occurred to me I haven't played any other character for such a length of time in my entire career as Derek Smalls. It's fun to work out how he must look now and how he must act. I like putting my oar in the 'lukewarm water'.”

Shearer also has a healthy career as a satirist on his long-running radio and now internet programme Le Show which began in 1983.

“Often I would hear, see or read something which would raise me to anger and satire was a way of channelling that anger in a socially acceptable way,” he says. “There has never been any money changing hands, nobody can tell me what to do. The show has changed shape many times.”

He also wrote and directed the documentary The Big Uneasy, which sought to expose the poor defences which led to the fatal flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The film follows two engineers working independently to determine the cause of the flooding, and a whistleblower who suggests the mistakes which caused the deaths of nearly 2,000 people are being repeated in new flood defence systems.

Shearer also co-wrote and starred in the Sky Arts special and series Nixon's The One, based on the former US President's infamous tapes of his time in office.

But it is through voicing Springfield residents Mr Burns, Bart's nemesis Principal Skinner, preacher Reverend Lovejoy, stoner bus driver Otto and neighbourino Ned Flanders among many others that Shearer is best known.

“At the beginning The Simpsons was a 12-week job on the Fox TV network,” says Shearer. “It was a new network, which it wasn't easy to receive in many cities in the US.”

Now the international hit has completed its 26th season, but what happens next is anyone's guess.

“I don't even know if there will be a season 27,” says Shearer. “My contract ended with Season 26, and there has been no decision on their part or any communication with me at this point.

“When I leave the theatre after Daytona I get two or three people wanting me to sign a programme, and about 20 wanting me to sign a picture of Mr Burns.”

DAYTONA Theatre Royal Brighton, New Road, Monday, September 8 to Saturday, September 13