Having trained to teach secondary school children, Rob Rouse has emerged as one of the country's great young comedians. "I didn't think I was quite special enough to be a teacher, and I think you've got to really want to do it, and I didn't want to do it enough. I think stand up is easier." It's as simple as that. Rob's specialist subject was geography. "Go on, test me." We start to list off countries of the world so Rob can show-off his knowledge of capital cities "Is it Rome? I dunno". And then we hit him with the biggy, "How is an ox-bowe lake formed?" A blank look flashes across his face before one of smugness. "It is built by oxes, because oxes are very into archery, and they build ceremonial lakes out of respect for Robin Hood." Looking rather pleased with himself he then adds, "I would suggest you cross-reference that with your text book girls, otherwise you'll probably forget it." Quite frankly this is worrying, leading us to believe he has made the right career choice. After all, it's always best to choose something you can excel in.

And his decision wasn't purely for selfish reasons, "if I die on my arse on stage, it doesn't really matter. But if I teach and I was to be a shit teacher, then that's actually ruining kids lives.. I wasn't really ready for that level of responsibility". Reknowned for his lunacy, anyone who knows Rob will find it very hard to imagine that anyone ever left him in charge of 30 or so teenagers. "Often they were bigger than me and they seemed older. I've sort of lived my life backwards and I've gotten sillier and sillier as I've gotten older." Rob made the leap from teaching to stand-up by following the example of his mate Geordie John. He went to see John perform in a play, which he found very funny." I'd lived with him for two years and never seen him do something like that, he was just hilarious but just the ability to tell stories is dead funny." Whilst still studying, Rob landed himself a part in an Alan Ayckborn play. He played an old man and true to form was really silly and got loads of laughs. "When I realised I didn't want to be a teacher, I thought, what do I want to do? I just thought, fuck it, I'll move down to London and try and do it..because I knew you could."

Suddenly Fleetwood Mac comes on over the sound system and Rob's train of thought is swept off into reminiscence, "What were you into when you were 16 years old? Stuff which was reasonable to be into. I wasn't, I was into Fleetwood Mac. I was so boring." And as soon as he is distracted he is back with the original thread of conversation. "When I look back through my life a bit more, certain things began to come in place, I'd muck around a lot or make people laugh."

Rob's first taste of stand-up was in a local pub in Sheffield with two of his mates from the theatre group, which pathed the way for his first solo open spot at Ha Bloody Ha in London. "I remember thinking 'fucking hell, this is quite difficult'. It was very pants." Having never been to London or seen any stand-up before it was hard for Rob to know what to expect but "what I wanted to do wasn't necessarily what other people were doing". "I don't think it went very well. They tolerated me, I think I got away with it, but I didn't die on my arse." Rob wasn't easily deterred. He pursued this line for three or four months.

As with most comedians, there are certain aspects of performance that Rob does not find funny, which are too fabricated and premeditated. Rob uses a nameless comedian to illustrate some examples. "People use heckle put downs as if they've written. And when they reel off really fast lists of things and everybody laughs hysterically and applauds at the end, cos they think it's really funny. 'It's great, because he can say things really fast!' It's not funny, is it?. Or just going 'something is shit', and everybody going 'Yay!' Or 'I wish Jaime Oliver would just die' and everybody going 'Yeah!' That's not funny. It's not creative, it's just crap. He just battered the audience into submission of coming with him. They were laughing at something they didn't really find funny."

It was Rob's determination not to fall into such lazy traps which lead to him adopt the pseudonym of 'Cyril'. " I gave myself this pseudonym just to help me think about everything I wanted to do on stage. Although I'm talking bollocks and telling complete lies, it's actually truer, because it's what I find funny" and after a month or so building confidence in his performance Rob started performing as himself. "At the end of the day it's just making people laugh but you could be doing any job that you wouldn't necessarily be enjoying. I don't want it to feel like there's a treadmill, a defined path you have to take to get there."

Clearly Rob's style of stand-up is based purely on entertaining people. "It's the audience who pays your wages, it's the audience who you perform for. And if you want to perform for yourself, that's great, but don't charge anyone any money. I don't want to do kind of art house free shows where it's up it's own arse, it's got to be funny. But there's no reason why you can't be creative and be funny and make it work."

Rob recently worked with Sean Lock on his final radio series of '15 Storeys High'. Originally Rob auditioned for the part of Sean's flatmate Errol which wasn't the part he ended up playing. "I was actually a little disappointed, because having read the script it's just really funny and it was something I would have really loved to have done". But luckily for Rob, on the day of the first recording, one of the cast members was unable to get down to London due to the horrendous weather conditions at the time, so Rob was asked to fill in. He went down so well they asked him to do the remaining four recordings. "That was great because I'd never done radio before. You have to think about how it sounds but you have to play to the audience who are in front of you as well, so it's really weird. That was great."

Rob is also one third of the popular sketch group 'Big and Daft'. Being part of BAD as well as performing solo stand-up gives Rob a chance to show off his 'acting' skills. In BAD, Rob plays the son of a simpleton which he carries off with worrying ease. In the last few months of 2000, Big and Daft were part of UK Play's new music/comedy show 'Terrorville'. It interspersed pop videos within comedy sketches performed against a virtual background of a fictional town, Terrorville. Other performers on the show included Noble and Silver, 2000 Perrier Best Newcomers, Jon Reed, and saw the successful pairing of Count Arthur Strong and Terry Titter.

"I was really pleased with it. Most of it came across pretty well. We've managed to translate what we do onto it because you can't really do it the same it has to be different." The cartoony feel produced by the virtual setting complimented the larger-than-life feel which Big and Daft portray in live gigs. "We did it in two days and I think it was quite a good reflection of what we were doing...sandwiches were nice as well, they had nice sandwiches. "

Rob has been on terrestrial television before. On Channel 4's Comedy Lab - 'Pornorama'. The original idea for which was pitched by Lucy Porter and Dan Maier and involved Rob along with Phil Nicol presenting an irreverent review of the world of pornography." We had a great laugh doing it because it meant [snorts] we had to watch porn for about four weeks and write jokes, which was an experience. I don't have a collection of it. No, honestly. We tried to escape with tapes but we couldn't! They tagged us all. And if you escaped with one you got coloured with horrendous red dye."

Obviously before starting on the show, Rob felt it necessary to do some research of his own. Something he found a little more awkward that expected. "I spent about two hours walking past this little shop that I used to go into. Mrs. P, I used to go in there and have a great laugh with her. So I ended up walking up to the garage. I just grabbed three off the top, not realising one of them was about seven quid, because it was an extra mucky one. A flood of school children came in, and the man spent what seemed like hours putting them into what was blatantly a clear plastic bag! And then I just scuttled out!"

Hot on the heels of Terrorville, Rob will be starring in the pilot of BBC's answer to 'Trigger Happy TV', 'Rumbled', but, he says, he is not in a desperate hurry to do telly stuff. "I don't feel there's a rush. The worst thing you can do in life is compare yourself as a result of what other people are achieving. As long as you're happy with what you're doing and you're working hard at it and you're enjoying it, then it's going to happen at it's own pace." Rob has a wise head on his shoulders. When asked about what he sees himself doing in the future he replies "You can't predict that kind of thing, you can't say I want to do this on telly, I want to do that on telly. I think the best thing is to get to a point where you can say right, this is what we want to do, can you help us do it? Stand up I don't think really works on telly other than to say come and see me live. And I think if you can use telly to help you do that and use telly in a creative way because there's so much crap on telly."

Rob doesn't have any immediate or definite plans, finding it easier to take life a bit at a time, but one thing he would like to do in the future, stand-up wise, is a one-man show. He just wants to keep developing, get better and get more people along to see him. His main ambition, which is more of a new year's resolution, is more on a personal level about nerves. Rob, perhaps surprisingly, still tends to get weak at the knees when his name is called. "What I'm working on is not being nervous at any point before the gig, because I don't think that helps me." But it seems Rob has identified the main cause of his problem, "I think it's all connected with Red Bull and things like that because it's just fucking horrible stuff."

"Big and Daft obviously, we're going to do Edinburgh again this year, and see how that develops with telly stuff. We did some, and we perhaps lost a bit of ground over that kind of thing but I don't think we've missed the boat. I don't think there is a boat to miss, really. There's lots of boats." Big and Daft haven't done quite as much as they would have liked since the Edinburgh festival but they're still happy, get on great and are confident with what they're doing, "and the main thing is that we continue to keep growing."

At the end of the interview, Rob sits back, looking relieved that the ordeal is over. He immediately apologises for his performance. "I'm crap at answering questions! Serious ones! You could try to be really funny in interviews, but you're asking out of interest of what things are, so I'm trying to be as honest as possible."

He is still quite happy to talk about Rumbled, the new BBC show that could lead him on to national fame. "It's not reinventing the wheel, it's a hidden camera show, which is a pilot that we've done which is going to be broadcast on BBC2." Rumbled is more about people's actual responses to certain contrived situations rather than a single hit and run act. The show also features Catherine Tate (Lee Mack's Bits, Attention Scum, That Peter Kay Thing), Steven Furst and Mark Wotton from Cyderdelic. "It ranges from some dark stuff to some very very silly stuff, which I was involved with. My favourite thing was this thing called Bus Stop Bingo." Bus Stop Bingo is pretty much as you would imagine it to be. Rob dressed in a pink suit, standing at a bus stop with a real bingo machine playing bingo with the old ladies in the bus queue. "It was great because all the old dears joined in and they were playing and I had a catchphrase and was called Jimmy Sparkles." Far from trying to ridicule the ladies, Rob was the butt of the joke. "You knew that when they come along they know this isn't what normally happens at bus stops - they're not thick - but they kind of go, 'fuck it, it's fun! It's a bit of a laugh!'"

Rob Rouse. The old ladies friendly comedian.