Sandy Gilmore is no longer a jockey but retains an interest in horses - he has a bet every day. He doesn't say whether he's put any money on his own chances of winning a new TV talent show looking to crown the country's top new comedy performer.

With 30 years of telling jokes behind him, the former jockey from Richmond can hardly be classed as "new", although he's never earned any money from making people laugh.

"I've just done it for charity," he says. "To raise money for the Injured Jockeys Fund or at friends' birthdays and anniversaries."

That could change after Stand Up Britain. He appears in the Tyne Tees Television heats of this national talent show and, if he wins the viewers' vote, will go through to the finals to compete against comedians from all over the country.

Comedy runs in his family. Both his father and grandfather were great comics, he says, although they never went on stage.

"They'd sit in the pub and entertain, or tell jokes in the house if there was a party going on," says Sandy. "My father never swore in his life or told a blue joke, but he was magic."

His father's comic legacy was a little black book of jokes. Sandy regrets that he's lost the book itself, replacing it with one of his own.

"I have thousands of jokes written down," he says. "Every time I hear a joke, I write down one word to remind me of it. Every day people come up and tell me jokes, and I make a note of them.

"I have some my father told me from the First World War. He'd write the punchlines down in his little black book."

His coalminer father worked at Murton Colliery for 50 years, absent only during military service in the First World War. With a large family to support, he did another job too for 25 years - as a gravedigger.

"He was paid 50p a grave. He'd go down the mines for an eight-hour shift and then maybe dig graves for three hours. It used to take several days to dig one grave," says Sandy.

"He had some fabulous jokes about gravediggers and I still tell them now."

Sandy became a jockey at 15 for Harry Peacock's stables in Richmond, before moving to Sweden to ride. When he returned in 1968, he was 32 and found it difficult to get rides as a jockey.

After two years, he left the racing game and went to work for a punter he'd met who owned a carpet warehouse and offered to teach him the business.

"I had two children and needed to make a living, so I worked with him for three years," he recalls. "Then I opened a carpet warehouse, which went bust because people wouldn't pay their bills."

He returned to the horses as a stable yard man until arthritis in his ankle and knee forced him to retire six months ago at 65.

For nearly three decades, doing comedy has been part of his life away from work. He remembers his first time in front of a microphone making an audience laugh - at Richmond Comrades Club in 1964, when one of his mates suggested he have a go during the free-and-easy session.

He performed at the club regularly for nothing over the following eight or nine years.

Once he even told jokes in front of an all-Swedish audience in Stockholm while working as a jockey over there. "I entertained all the racing staff," he says.

"Everyone speaks English in Sweden. We were in a nightclub and the comedian never turned up. I asked if I could get up for five minutes and do a turn. I brought the house down."

One reluctant member of his audience these days is his wife Margaret.

"She comes to see me now and again, but she thinks I'm talking about her when I tell wife jokes," he says.

"I've told her I'm not. I'm making out she's 24 stone and I'm only little at 4ft 10in. I make a lot of fun about when we are in bed. I don't swear. It's only innuendo."

He entered the Stand Up Britain contest after seeing it advertised on TV and he was filmed performing at the Tower Studio, Hartlepool. He says it was the most nerve-racking thing he's ever done, although once he was on stage in front of the microphone, his nerves vanished.

"Afterwards I was talking to this group of 18 to 20-year-olds who said they'd been going there every Sunday for three years and that I was the best. They said, 'can we have your autograph?'. I felt ten feet tall," says Sandy.

He hasn't given up interest in racing entirely as his daily bet demonstrates. He wouldn't describe himself as a gambler, just someone who loves a flutter.

Sometimes he combines comedy and gambling. A big fan of Tony Hancock, he backed two horses at a recent race at Catterick whose names were linked to the late comedian - Half Hour, which made him think of the Hancock's Half Hour series, and Mind How You Go, one of Hancock's favourite phrases. His hunch paid off and he won £500.

* Stand Up Britain is on Tyne Tees on Friday at 11.30pm