"Friday's lairy-casual. Saturday's dressy but lively. Sunday could be T-shirt, jeans, just gone to B&Q.

"Or it could be mental. Sunday is always a lucky dip."

The only proponent of the belief Little Chefs were built on ley lines, and the only man to have accused battery farmers of pumping in Chris de Burgh to make chickens lay faster, Bill Bailey is also the only comedian to score a Paramount Comedy hat-trick.

With a show which updates last year's sell-out with "more personal stories", "a sense that we're constantly on the verge of some new apocalypse" and, possibly, if he has time to "put on a tie and comb my hair to the side", a pastiche of Franz Ferdinand, he begins a three-night Brighton run tomorrow.

Part of the reason for Bailey's top billing is his TV profile, from being the most consistently chuckle-worthy contestant on Never Mind The Buzzcocks to his hilariously-understated performance as the gentle, ponytailed Manny in surreal sitcom Black Books. But, he reckons, "I just don't have the looks for TV".

"When I was going for the job of Buzzcocks," he reveals, "the producers went to the head of ITV, Jane Root, and said, Sean Hughes is leaving and we need to replace him. We really want Bill Bailey to do it'. And she said, Oh not him, he looks too weird. What about someone like Ralph Little?' "

Far from deflecting attention from his appearance, Bailey called his last show Part Troll and admitted that, with the Britney mic in place, he looked like a cross between a wizard in a call centre and a Klingon motivational speaker.

But he's still surprised by the inventiveness of the descriptions with which critics fill their reviews.

"I've had medieval roadie' and bonsai Meatloaf'," he recalls. "And someone wrote that my hair hangs down like a shower curtain'. The latest came from a review in Edinburgh. They said I had a dowager's hump'!"

While Bailey admits to being "a little hurt" by such observations, he's not one for bitter recriminations. Meandering pleasantly through a field of humour whose reference points fall somewhere between those of the medievalist and the sci-fi fanatic and mulling over philosophy, religion and semantics in a way which is both searchingly intelligent and gently inoffensive, Bailey is the most affable comic around.

"It's a problem, isn't it?" he laughs.

"If you're prone to mad rants and mood swings or you have a drink problem, or any number of these afflictions which mean you're constantly getting into relationships that keep crashing and burning, then your whole life is a beautiful sea of comedy to be richly mined.

"If you're quite pleasant and eventempered and happily married, it's quite hard doing comedy."

Nevertheless, Bailey manages, wellserved by the musical talent (expect such genre-blending feats as a Portishead cover of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah and a Kraftwerk-esque take on the Hokey Cokey) which once saw him seek worldwide fame with The Rubber Bishops.

"We used to come down to play the Concorde in Brighton," he recalls.

"That was always a riot. I remember once the crowd actually lifted me up and dragged me round the room like I was a hunting trophy. I really scuffed my arm. That was a Friday night, you see - lairy casual. People with nice clothes on don't get involved in that sort of thing."

Starts at 8pm. Tickets cost £20-£18, call 01273 709709.