HE’S known to TV viewers as the motor-mouthed auctioneer from Storage Hunters and its UK spin-off series.

But there’s far more to Sean Kelly than the ability to speak at a hundred miles an hour and to referee larger-than life bidders out for a bargain as a Blackburn audience is about to discover.

For Sean will headline a night of stand-up comedy at King George’s Hall on Saturday which also features fellow Storage Hunter regulars Cameron ‘Green Mile’ Row and T Money, Tarrell Wright - each one of them award-winning comics in their own right.

“I think this show has been a big shocker for a lot of people,” said Sean. “When someone sees you doing one thing, they put a label on you and think that’s what you do.

“But I started doing comedy long before I was an auctioneer.”

Sean has headlined at the prestigious MGM Grand in Las Vegas and is a regular on the American stand-up circuit.

Being a top comedian isn’t the only surprising thing about Sean and even he admits you could forgive people for thinking his CV was a flight of fancy.

After all, would you believe he worked for US military intelligence and interrogated former East German Stasi agents?

“One of the things I want to do after this tour is to go and do motivational speaking for young adults who are struggling. I’ve been going back and examining my own life and when I look at it on paper it’s crazy,” he said.

His parents divorced when he was 10 with his dad going to Germany to sell insurance to American GIs based there.

“A year later he and my mother decided to live together for a while so he took us back to Germany from California,” he said. “He threw me into a German school even though I didn’t speak a word of German and that’s how the whole adventure started.”

Sean discovered he had a natural aptitude for languages and an ear for accents.

“I enlisted in the army as a translator for military intelligence and when they discovered I could literally speak like a native German speaker, I was given top secret clearance and assigned to do some interrogation work.”

Sean credits his wife Lori for getting him involved in comedy.

“I had always loved comedy,” he said. “I think my coping mechanism when I was a kid was to joke around and make others laugh.

“Lori was PA to Joan Rivers before we married and then worked for the National Security Agency breaking encrypted East German code - that’s how we met.

“She got fed up of hearing me saying I’d like to try comedy, so when she saw an advert for a comedy class in San Diego where we were living at the time, she cut it out and told me to go.”

Sean describes his comedy style as ‘being in the Bill Cosby mode’.

“When I watch British comedians, I can really appreciate how clever a lot of them are,” he said.

“Me on the other hand, my sense of humour is dumbed way down. You’re not going to walk out of my show going ‘that was clever’ but hopefully you will walk out laughing saying ‘that was great and I learned so much about this crazy guy’.”

Sean is delighted to be sharing the tour with his two close friends whom he knew long before getting involved in Storage Hunters.

“They are both great stand-ups,” he said. “T Money was actually attending auctions long before the TV show as a way of supplementing his income and I got Green Mile involved in the show when hundreds of people started turning up, so I went to the biggest person I know to protect me!”

At the end of the show audience members are invited to bring along items which Sean will auction off with proceeds going to Help for Heroes.

Sean Kelly and the Stars of Storage Hunters, King George’s Hall, Blackburn, Saturday, October 7. Details from 0844 847 1664 or www.kinggeorgeshall.com