WHEN it comes to putting words into other people’s mouths, Nina Conti has turned it into an art form.

For her new show - In Your Face - which comes to King George’s Hall, Blackburn, on Saturday, the award-winning ventriloquist uses members of the audience as her ‘dummies’. Using specially-made masks Nina provides the voices for the volunteers who come on stage - with hilarious results.

Fans of Nina will be delighted to know that her trusty sidekick, Monk the foul-mouthed monkey, remains part of the show, but it’s the mask-wearing members of the audience who take centre stage.

“After a while I think everyone forgets that there’s a member of the audience on stage with me,” said Nina.

“It’s always a shock when the mask comes off and you see the person they were 20 minutes before. You go ‘oh gosh it was you, I thought you were Sottish and loud but your not'.

“It’s quite sad really, it’s like saying goodbye to my new best friend who I just made up. We get on great on stage.”

Making audience members the centre of attention would, you think, be a risk, but Nina says that in two years of performing the show in various forms, she’s only encountered two “real idiots”.

“At the start of the show I’ll talk to the audience with Monkey to assess people’s comfort levels. Monkey’s the casting director but really the audience decides who should come up - it sort of happens naturally.”

Because she is working with different people every night, Nina admits the bulk of the show is totally unscripted but that inspires her rather than worries her.

“I do find something about the ingredients of the show that don’t make it terrifying,” she said. “It’s not like walking out on my own with a microphone and having to be brilliant and inspired each time.

“There’s so much there, such a framework there, that it’s impossible for nothing to develop.”

Nina is one of very few ventriloquists working at the highest level.

“It’s not for everyone I suppose,” she said, “But there’s something about my own psychology that just makes it liberating for me.

“I write in dialogue and I think in a question and answer way quite naturally and second guess my thoughts so to have an extra voice works well with my line of thinking.

“I see myself as a facilitator with this show in a way. Obviously I’m doing all the voices and the ideas are mine but they are narrations of what what I’m seeing around me. I’m acting as a filter.

For the Blackburn show, the audience will get the chance to see a new element which Nina has only just introduced which sees Monkey acting as an agony aunt for audience members.

“Whose life wouldn't be improved by a talking monkey?” she laughed.

When her UK tour ends in November, Nina will be taking the show to New York for a series of dates in December with a full US tour possible in 2017.

Nina Conti, King George’s Hall, Blackburn, Saturday, October 22. Details from 0844 847 1664