MILTON Jones, the king of the one-liner and Mock the Week regular, is back in Blackburn next week.

His new show, The Temple of Daft, sees Jones take on the mantle of Indiana Jones, don the hat and set off on a madcap journey in to surrealist comedy.

We caught up with Milton to talk about big hair, bad shirts and his new direction.

Your new tour is called The Temple of Daft. Why?

Basically, previous tours have been lots of jokes in different forms, but basically lots of jokes. This is more of a story, more like one of my radio shows. It loosely, and I say loosely, follows a kind of adventure-archaeology type story. It started off with me noticing that I had the same surname as Indiana Jones, and it has all transpired from there.

How do you prepare for a tour?

I begin to go to little out-of-the-way places to test my ideas. Generally speaking, the further you travel, the more pleased they are to see you. I will go with bits of paper and ideas, and it will be throwing mud against a wall and seeing what sticks. Eventually I’ll accrue enough material to do try-outs nearer home. So, it’s a trial and error process from the beginning of that.

Your schedule is preposterous. How do you remain sane?

Well, it is difficult, and there are some weeks, or some months, where you’re away from home quite a lot, and maybe it’s the winter and maybe you’re up north and it’s quite grim all round... But it’s actually harder to write a tour, creatively, you know, that’s where the brain ache is.

Once you’ve got a show that’s up and running, it’s more a physical battle.

I try and see as many people around the country as I can, friends and relatives. Because there’s nothing worse than talking to hundreds of people, and then being the last person out of the car park, go to a hotel, and then the next time you talk to someone properly is when you talk to hundreds of people the next night.

That’s a recipe for madness.

A lot of your comedy is quite word based – can you just come up with it?

No. It’s all about writing as much as you can, and then taking the top 10 per cent. The new show will have between 200 and 250 jokes, probably, but that doesn’t mean that’s all I’ve written.

Do you have books and books of jokes that you might return to?

Never throw anything away, is my motto, in that if you thought there was a seed of something that was funny, keep it on file. Especially one-liners because one syllable, one word, changing the picture in people’s heads, can suddenly make something work that didn’t before.

Has being known as the king of the one-liner ever been an encumbrance at all?

Yeah I mean, in a way, I’ve got to be grateful... people want to put you in a box, so that originally it’s people who are booking gigs; they want to know what type of comedian you are to fit on a bill.

And I think that’s true of television as well, to some extent. On Mock the Week, I sit in the one-liner chair, and if it’s not me, it’s Stewart Francis or Gary Delaney – you know, it’s the “odd” bloke, so that has gone in my favour.

I’m sort of grateful for where it’s got me, but if I go for an audition for another show, albeit a sitcom or something, it’s quite often as the crazy neighbour.

You think well, I’m glad I’ve got this audition, but it’d be nice not to have to do that role forever. So, I suppose this show is me trying to move things on.

And finally, we have to ask – where do you get your shirts from?

It’s tricky with shirts because people think, “Oh zany shirt!”, but actually the zaniest of shirts is too much. What I like are shirts that people go, “Oh that looks… hang on, is that good or bad?” They are usually from Oxfam or retro shops.

  • Milton Jones and the Temple of Daft, King George’s Hall, Blackburn, Thursday, May 21. Details from 0844 847 1664.