The success of competitive cook-off and primordial bitch-fest Come Dine With Me has come at a price for its puckish narrator.

Dave Lamb, star and single constant of the Channel Four show, says its popularity has brought on something of a dry season for dinner parties in his social diary.

“Strangely enough, I’ve not been invited nor thrown any since the success of the show, which is deeply suspicious,” he laughs.

“But I’m sure it’s purely circumstantial.”

It’s a shame, as behind the sandpaper dry put-downs and acerbic wit of the “character” of his narrator is a genuine charmer – the kind of chap you’d willingly have over for a dinner party. But it might be worth giving his place a wide swerve when his turn to cook comes around; he admits to being near-useless in the kitchen and in early interviews even said he’d give his wife – a chef – a call if he found himself baffled by the pronunciation of the ingredients. He’s keen to put the record straight on that particular point, however.

“My wife’s livid about me telling everyone she’s a chef, because she’s not a working chef – she has a chef’s qualification, and she wants me to refer to her as a very good cook.”

So there you have it. But what Lamb lacks in kitchen nous, he makes up for with a wealth of experience of witnessing how to host a dinner party very badly. A new Come Dine With Me stocking-filler DVD contains many such examples, including some intriguing post-prandial nudity.

“I think the biggest thing people get wrong on the show is going in with too firm an idea of what they want to do. The people who try to educate their guests with quality food are barking up the wrong tree too – that story’s only ever going to end one way – and if you think you can impose fun on people then something’s gone very fundamentally wrong. It’s not rocket science and I think it’s just about reacting to the guests you find yourself with and accommodating them.”

The reactions on the show take wildly different forms, of course, from an immediate meeting of minds to the rather more frequent bitter confrontations. The show has certainly seen its fair share of 24-carat rotters, but Lamb believes justice is usually done.

“I think the villain quite often gets their comeuppance. Occasionally, the villain will win, but usually – like all master criminals – they make one crucial mistake and get found out in the end.”

Whomever they’re thrown into the culinary lions’ den with, contestants on the programme can always expect a mauling from Lamb, who watches the show unfold “blind” as we do when he records his narration. He started off improvising, but as his persona developed (“it’s so camp and enthusiastic I don’t know who it is any more”), he and the show’s writers got ever bolder. But does he ever hear from the contestants he’s savaged?

“The only time I’ve run into one was doing a phone interview on a radio station and suddenly they said, ‘Here in the studio we’ve got [contestant] Mike Olley’ and played in the things I’d said about him. He’d had some cheese in his pocket all day so he could serve it at body temperature, which is a pretty revolting thing to do, but he took it all in good spirits.

I think most people realise it’s all done in the name of fun.”

Lamb’s mischievous commentary has brought several spoonfuls of brilliance to what might’ve seemed rather a dull show on paper. And through it, Lamb himself has become a kind of disembodied celebrity, yet even his voice is different when he’s not in front of the mic.

“If I spoke like that all the time, I’d be dead,” he laughs. “But it’s been nice being known for your voice because you don’t get recognised. Having said that, over the past couple of weeks, people have shouted my name at me a couple of times, which is a very worrying development…”

For all his success, Lamb never planned to be a narrator at all; his entire career hinges on a fateful bet with a fellow student as he studied English and philosophy at the University of Warwick.

“She was called Jessica Jones and she said she’d do a singing performance in the Student Union if I auditioned for a play. So I went up for a part in The Comedians by Trevor Griffiths and got it.”

In the cast, he met the members of The Cheese Shop, the sketch troupe they formed together.

“We started doing a half-hour show on the campus radio station, which broadcast to about nine people. We cut together some best-of tapes, sent them off to Radio 4 and eventually they gave us a chance.”

As an actor, Lamb appeared in Armstrong And Miller, EastEnders, and most notably as “the token white man”

in long-running sketch show Goodness Gracious Me (next up is an appearance in Only Fools And Horses prequel series Rock And Chips).

But when the producers of Come Dine With Me needed a replacement for their original voiceover artist, his career took an unexpected detour, and something of a cult sensation was born.

The slow-burn success of the show has coincided with the birth of a little girl for Lamb and his wife, and a move to Brighton from Dorset two years ago.

“Because we’d had our daughter we wanted to get back to civilisation quick-smart, and so we headed to Brighton … I was under the impression you needed a child to get in.

“But we’re really pleased we moved here and this is where we’re going to stay.”

His old pal from The Cheese Shop, Ben Ward – now a screenwriter – is also Sussex-based, and when he and a group of fans convinced people from across the community to chip in to bring Lewes FC back from the brink of collapse, they knocked on Lamb’s door. He loves his involvement with the club.

“Living in north Brighton, it’s quite easy for me to get over there. The money’s killing the game at the top level, so what a brilliant thing to go over and see some proper football you can actually smell and almost touch. And at the Dripping Pan [Lewes FC’s ground] you can take your pint out on the terrace and wander around the ground with it.”

As his new home, Brighton will also be central to the new comedy he’s writing for Radio 4, Railings And Spikes.

“It’s about two conspiracy theorists and it’s being written as we speak. We’re going try it out in front of Brighton audiences before recording it at [Gardner Street venue] Komedia. The production company’s always been a regional thing and we’ve always wanted to do things away from London.”

Does he go in for sinister government plots himself?

“I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I definitely have sympathies in that direction. It’s about the climate of fear we’re living in and how we’re all very suspicious today … but with jokes!”

Between Come Dine With Me, his own writing and the important demands of a young family, it seems Lamb has precious little time to take on anything else. Yet momentum has been steadily building in the blogosphere to make him the voice of the Eurovision Song Contest.

You can almost hear Lamb’s mordant tones as Moldova unleashes its latest horror upon the world, but it’s a mystery as to how the internet campaign came about.

“It certainly didn’t start with me!” Lamb laughs.

“People are just saying they think it would be funny, but I think [Terry Wogan’s successor as host] Graham Norton’s doing a very good job. And he can keep it.”

*Come Dine With Me – The Tasty Bits is out now on DVD from ITV Studios Home Entertainment.

Railings and Spikes will be previewed live at The Nightingale Theatre on January 16. The show will be recorded for Radio 4 at Komedia, Gardner Street on February 20, 2011 and March 20, 2011. Call 0845 2938480 or visit www.komedia.co.uk