If you were a late comer to the Canal Café theatre, you would initially have been forgiven for thinking you were in the wrong venue. Standing up on stage is an old, round shouldered man, giving a rambling, misguided talk on what is supposed to be the subject of the dramatic and comedic arts. However, he seems unable to carry a train of thought for more than a few moments, and keeps getting distracted by anything and everything. Taking your seat, however, you can be assured you are in fact present for the comedy night, as while the shambolic lecture continues, the entire audience is rendered helpless with laughter.

Steve Delaney plays Count Arthur Strong, a deluded aging old school entertainer, who runs an "Academy of Performance" in Doncaster. Count Arthur, along with Terry Titter (played by Terry Kilkelly) have been taking the Edinburgh Fringe by storm for the past few years. They have appeared alongside the likes of Big and Daft and Noble and Silver on Play UK as well as in their own short films on the Paramount Comedy Channel. They are currently working on an eight part sitcom with Chrysalis Television. They can count Johnny Vegas and The Boosh among their fans. In short, if you don’t already adore them, you will soon have the opportunity to join their legions of admirers. We were lucky enough to catch up with Steve Delaney earlier this year in London, and this is what he said.

Steve has been performing Count Arthur for over twenty years, since he first played him in drama college. “I did Arthur for a circus exercise. He was a sort of strong man who then fought Dracula… It was just a way out of pretending to be a clown.” However, he has only been seriously performing him for the past five or six years. Following drama college, Steve “arsed around” for a long time as an actor, doing bit parts on television programmes. However, with his first serious performance as Arthur, he knew he had found something special. “The day after I did my first gig as Arthur I knocked it on the head. It was as immediate as that. I phoned my agent up and we went our separate ways the day after. I had spent probably ten years wondering why I wanted to be an actor and when I did Arthur I think it had the answer. That was the performance I had in me. I’m not really interested in doing anything else now, frankly.”

On the same day he decided to give up television acting, he also decided to bring Arthur’s first solo show up to Edinburgh, which engendered a very mixed reaction, and some initially poor audience figures. “It was like performing in a vacuum, but it was also extremely funny in a sense because the overview of Arthur doing those gigs is that nobody would be there anyway. You’d have six people, one of them would be asleep, two would leave, the other two would be foreign, but he’d carry on regardless.” Out of these performances, there was a lot of media interest, and a great deal of interest from the Perrier panel, as his show was nominated for the Perrier Best Newcomer. “I think there was a kind of row, but in the end the half that was for me said that if you don’t give him Perrier Newcomer then we’ve got to give them a special commendation, which is really bizarre because two years before that they had created the best newcomer because they were split on the main award. Two years later they had another row and they come up with this special commendation. Which is nonsense.”

Another thing that came from that Festival appearance is Steve’s pairing with Terry Kilkelly, who plays Terry Titter. The combination was suggested by an executive from Paramount Comedy Channel, who were interested in producing a show with the two of them together. “We sort of hit it off and we wrote three five minute shows which I believe are still going out on the Paramount channel at about 3 in the morning.” These shorts turned out to be the last in-house productions for the channel, and were set in a music hall which is on it’s last legs. “Everything is essentially a scheme of Terry and Arthur’s to try and put it back on the map, but they all end in failure, which is a general pattern of life I feel.”

On stage, Steve is horribly convincing as the spluttering old geriatric. Every aspect of the character, from the outfit to the delivery to the random tangents he meanders off on, is terribly believable, and the performance is both touching and worrying. Running through warm up exercises at the beginning of the talk, he becomes dizzy through turning his head too quickly. As the evening wears on, Arthur appears to become more and more confused, either through the onset of dementia or the contents of the glass he has brought on with him and eventually begins to talk to. The effect is both embarrassing and endearing. Although absolutely hilarious, at the same time the subtle pathos played out is also very unsettling as the audience’s compassion and patience is pushed right to the edge.

Steve tries not to analyse the character too much. “I don’t really want to hear myself saying he’s this that or the other, because it kind of puts restraints on him… It is an instinctive creation of performance and in a sense I’m very happy that it’s that way round. I don’t sit down and think I’ll write this bit and Arthur will appear to be a baffoon in it. Generally I come up with a line or two and then write a whole thing around just one line that makes me laugh. Frankly, as soon as I put the gear on, every question mark and comma of the character is there, so I don’t really have to think about it.”

The most recent appearance Terry and Arthur have made on our television screens was in the sketch series Terrorville for Play UK. The work was fairly intense, shooting eight five minute sketches in one day, but Steve is quite pleased with the way the show turned out. “I think those animated backgrounds really really suited the way Terry and I look. It really seemed to sit well with us. Because we are slightly cartoonised ourselves anyway, and the camera work really lent itself to that, the way it was swinging in and out and there were some strange close ups and slightly distorted images of my head. They were probably fairly accurate… My least favourite are any of them that Terry’s doing a bit too much in. It’s kind of that love hate thing. Nah, not really. But you can put that in. If you want.”

Arthur and Terry will soon be returning to our television screens with a new sitcom. Six Of The Best (named because “we thought we were writing six in the first place, but it turns out it was eight”) is set in a school with Arthur as head master and Terry as deputy head. “It’s sort of like then two in a Carry On film, in a sense.” They plan to have guest appearances from other comedians every couple of episodes, such as The Boosh, and Mackenzie Crook as Mr Bagshawe. At the moment, Chrysalis television are “knowingly sitting quite firmly with their back sides on the script”, but the show should be going into production in the near future. Individually, both Terry and Steve have been working on their own solo projects. Terry will be appearing in the new Supergirly sitcom for BBC Choice, playing the gay character Malcolm, “something he feels the need to stick in everything we do somewhere along the lines.” Is he a big fan of Supergirly himself? “Being as diplomatic as I can, really, in a sense, I think that they have some really good backing tracks.”

Steve counts Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd among his favourite comedians. Of today’s crop, his choices are slightly more surprising. Six years ago at the Edinburgh Festival, he caught Charlie Chuck’s show. “Even when I find something funny I rarely break in to a laugh, but he had me absolutely howling. It was really quite therapeutic, it was quite an extraordinary reaction he provoked, actually.” He also admires the work of the Divine David who he says is “often brilliant. Sometimes not at all, but often brilliant.”

He admits to hiding behind the character of Arthur to some extent, and has tried to separate himself from the character in the eyes of the public. “Initially I always thought to myself I haven’t the slightest inclination to be seen or heard anywhere as Steve Delaney at all. I always got slightly annoyed if I read a review and it said ‘Delaney says’ or something like that in it. It always makes me cringe a bit because I’ve got nothing to say in a sense about an over view of comedy… I quite like sort of engendering this myth that Arthur is a real jobbing actor.” He recently recorded a radio programme for BBC Radio 4 as Arthur on the understanding that he wouldn’t be credited. “So all the credits were Count Arthur Strong plays Dickie Bow. The idea in my head was that Arthur has got a job at last!” Like Johnny Vegas, then. “Exactly. Exactly. Everyone thinks that’s who he is and everyone thinks he’s pissed all the time. I think he’s an absolute genius and I told him so. As people do at Late N Live. We bonded for a bit by the bar. He was buying me a drink at the time, I told him he was a genius. A nip of Jameson. You can put that in, that’s a bit of colour.”

He continues to avoid looking deeply at the origins of the character, or the processes through which Steve Delaney ‘becomes’ Count Arthur Strong. “I never really regarded things that I say as Arthur that haven’t been written, I’ve never really regarded as being improvised. It’s like having this conversation here with you. I’m not really sure at all what that says about me, about Arthur, about what I’m doing now or whether or not there’s something wrong with me.”