Dorridge’s Gary Delaney is one of the West Midlands’ most successful comics. An accomplished one-liner gagsmith and writer, his numerous TV credits include Mock The Week, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, Celebrity Pointless, Live At The Apollo, League Of Their Own, and 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Alongside his current solo headline tour, There’s Something About Gary, he’s now co-developed a new live panel show and podcast with comic buddy Caimh McDonnell: Panelbeaters. The rapid-fire live show comes to Birmingham’s The Glee as part of Birmingham Comedy Festival (16 October 2016). ‘There are no winners, only survivors,’ says the strapline.

Where did the idea for Panelbeaters come from?
Loads of car journeys! Me and Caimh have been buddies for years, he’s done lots of my tour supports, so we’ve spent a lot of time together on the road, and we made up games to keep ourselves entertained on long car journeys. The show is turning that into a format that people might be interested in, these quick ‘gaggy’ games. So Panelbeaters is partly mucking about in the car, and partly because I do panel shows, I have experienced a few of them.

What’s the format?
We don’t have teams, although Caimh’s the host and there are three contestants playing individually. And for a judge we have Death, who is quite sarcastic. He judges … that’s our little McGuffin.

Death?
Yes, Death, with the robes.

And scythe?
We’ve not be able to get a scythe, they’re not easy to get. You certainly can’t get them from a costume shop … maybe we will have to go to an agricultural supplier. I don’t think you’d be allowed to walk through the streets with a scythe though – it’s essentially a giant machete. We could get a jokey one.  We try not to have too much visual stuff in the show though, we try to keep it quite wordy – we let the words do the work. For the first run-through we did, it was really funny but visual. That was our first mistake – doing visual jokes in an audio medium.

How have the shows gone so far?
So far they’ve been fun. We’ve done three practice ones, so we’re still just working it out … we’ve done seven in all now, with 3-4 released as podcasts. We’ve only done shows around the North and Midlands, because that’s where we’re from and we didn’t want London to see it until it was ready…

It’s a live show and a podcast, but do you see it as something that will work in other media? Radio? TV?
Yes! But it is a podcast and if that’s all it ever ends up being, that’s fine

Since the Freeview switch-over, there seems to be more potential opportunities ...
People like [TV channel] Dave have become players now – you see what they did with Dave Gorman’s show – so there are more people in the market. Our first port of call will be radio, so we’ll pitch them. But it can be hard to keep it clean. It’s only when you edit it down you realise how much needless swearing you do! There is so much that is too rude for radio, so we do two versions – a clean one and a too-hot-for-podcast podcast, that we send out for the mailing list every so often that has all the bits in we couldn’t use. It can be an uphill struggle when you have comedians mucking around. Comedians can be d**** … if you say ‘don’t mention this’ then in their head they’re thinking, ‘umm, how can I mention that and be a hero?’ [laughs]

Alongside Panelbeaters, you’re also on tour …
Yes, I’m back on tour now. The tour stated in January and we keep adding more dates which takes us up until Christmas, then we’re going into January, up to May … who knows? I’ve been touring the show for 7-8 months now.

Is it a different show now to what you started with?
It has the same title. It’s not a brand new show, but it changes a little bit every week. I started on 6 January … and I’d say it’s 20%-25% changed since I started off at the beginning of the year. I took bits out, re-worked it a bit for Edinburgh and I liked it so I’ve kept those changes. In theory it won’t change now as, in theory, I should be writing for the next tour now. But I’m not disciplined enough - if I write something I tend to jump in and use it. But anything I write now I should be putting on the side for that next show. In the past, I haven’t, which has made my life much harder.

Any more TV looming?
The usual stuff. I do Mock The Week pretty regularly, so I’ll be back on that next year. Mock The Week is my bread and butter, but I do end up on others, like Celebrity Pointless, which was good fun. But Mock The Week is my meat and two veg’.

You’re very active on social media – do you schedule Tweets to go out, or is it all done on the fly, as and when?
I do it as and when, I don’t know how to schedule Tweets. Yesterday I did loads as the tour shows are coming up and it’s a great way to sell tickets. Tuesday I did a new material night, and they’re quite good, you can go up and try things out, and if they don’t make it, you can Tweet them later. I tend to do things as they occur to me though, as I’m waiting for a meeting or waiting in traffic, in the car, I’ll whip out my phone … and you get instant validation if it’s funny. Before Mock The Week I had 20,000 followers, 30,000, so it’s a great resource … [and followers] get a few jokes.

Do any of the Tweeted jokes end up in your live shows?
In theory, no. When a few thousand people have seen a Tweet you can’t use it in a show [Gary has 62k followers]. But you never know what might work. Things I think won’t work live won’t always work online. Sometimes I misjudge it. Like a couple of days ago I put up some new material. I was on stage and went through things … that’s rubbish, I won’t read that out. Then the next day I put it online. The joke was: ‘Apple farmers who are too scared to diversify should just grow a pear.’ And that’s been one of the most successful jokes on Twitter for a while – it got over 400 re-Tweets and 800 likes. I’m not as good as I think I am at judging what’s least likely to work. So I will go back to that joke, but it depends on how far your joke has gone, whether millions and millions of people have seen it. There was one Tweet – ‘I've got a new job playing the triangle in a reggae band, and ting’. I saw that in lots of places, people were repeating it, using it themselves, so I stopped doing it as no-one would believe that I’d written it. I can’t use it now. That’s the flipside … and [jokes] don’t last as long as they did, but you’re better off not moaning and making the most of it.

Panelbeaters, featuring Gary Delaney, Caimh McDonnell, Geoff Norcott and Tom Wrigglesworth, is at The Glee Club, Birmingham, on Sunday 16 October 2016.

Birmingham Comedy Festival runs from Friday 7 to Sunday 16 October. More information www.bhamcomfest.co.uk