THE show is ten minutes late starting and there is an atmosphere of panic running through the theatre foyer, with much hustling and bustling of technicians.

The audience is growing restless too, as they huddle together in a typically small, hot and airless Edinburgh Fringe Festival venue waiting to enter an equally small, hot, and airless auditorium to watch a Channel 4 comedy competition.

Through the throng pushes David Gibson, the Co Durham farmer attempting to break onto the comedy circuit. The "technical hitch" offered by an usher as the reason for the delay belongs to him. He went to check his keyboard, an essential part of his act as fading Northern nightclub entertainer Bobby Dresser, ten minutes before the show and found it wasn't working. This didn't seem the right time to start cracking jokes about funny farms as his chances of competing, let along winning, the last heats of the So You Think You're Funny contest, were put in jeopardy.

It capped a difficult day for 35-year-old Gibson that began at 6am on Wednesday on his 750-acre Lanchester farm. "We had a field of hay to bale. I wanted to look out of the window to see if the weather would let us do it, even thought I wouldn't be there," he explains.

Bad weather has delayed harvesting, but that was the least of his worries backstage at the theatre 12 hours later. He'd loaded his equipment - that keyboard and the black-and-white check suit he wears as Bobby Dresser - into the car and headed for Edinburgh, only to find the hotel where he'd booked a room appeared to be closed. Several frustrating hours later, he found somewhere else to stay for the night. Now his keyboard was broken and his act in trouble.

Happily, the backstage team found him a piano. Unhappily, it meant performing with his back to half the audience. Usually, he can work the entire auditorium from behind his keyboard.

But whatever the outcome of the competition, he has enjoyed the exposure - his 15 minutes of fame, you might say - that competing in the competition has brought him. And he's realistic about why the media put him in the spotlight. "A lot of interest has been generated because I'm a farmer whose farm has had foot-and-mouth. Put those together and I'm unique," he says.

In the run-up to the heats, he's been on GMTV's breakfast show and BBC Radio 5, as well as being featured in the Telegraph and the Times. The Mirror wanted his exclusive story, and he's been commissioned to write a column about his Edinburgh experiences for the Independent On Sunday. And, of course, Farmers Weekly wanted the full story.

He prefers to think it's his act, rather than him, that is unique, the idea of a comic who's down on his luck and trying to forge a new career doing stand-up comedy. Except he does it sitting down (at that damned keyboard).

A former professional pianist who spent two years playing in hotels and cocktail bars, Gibson's comedy career began when asked to accompany soloists at a friend's wedding in November. "I was just meant to introduce them and leave it at that, but I thought that was a bit boring," he recalls. "So I invented Albert J Hindmarsh, a bit of a Northern character. It went down a storm and people said, 'you should be doing this properly' and I thought, 'maybe'."

It took several months of cajoling by friends before he attended a beginners' night at the Hyena comedy club in Newcastle. He emerged thinking, 'I can do that' and started work, getting ten minutes of material together. He took the act back to the Hyena and was invited to do the final 15-minute spot at the next beginners' evening.

When the application forms for the local heats of So You Think You're Funny arrived through Newcastle Comedy Festival, he applied and won through to the heats in Edinburgh, one of 60 stand-ups chosen from over 300 acts that auditioned.

"I don't deliver boom-boom punch lines, I do the act as a character," Gibson explains. "I believe I have a good act, but comedy is subjective."

The problems facing British farmers give him little to laugh about, yet he says he'd never use farming as material for his act. Perhaps making people laugh provides a welcome release from the day-to-day dilemmas of farming.

"I love doing this. I get a tremendous buzz on a good night," he says of performing. "Farming has not had good fortune these past three years. Not just foot-and-mouth, but BSE and the strength of the pound. Jokes about farming would be too close to home, although other comedians do foot-and-mouth gags. I don't do any farming jokes, or use bad language or offensive material. It's clean humour."

His act goes down well on the night. He's first on, something he normally avoids, but was told if he wanted to set up his keyboards properly that was the best spot. Fate chose otherwise. He acquits himself well against punning students, a female duo singing the filthiest songs you've ever heard, another female duo who strip to their underwear and slap each other with rubber gloves, and a desperate chap in a safari suit who wisely quits before his seven minutes are up.

Gibson's sit-down act was probably never going to be top of the judges' list. He doesn't win through to the finals, and looks disappointed but not downhearted as we file out of the auditorium. He has other things on his mind, such as finishing the clean-up operation at his farm in the wake of foot-and-mouth.

"At the moment farming is my livelihood and my living," he says. "Farmers have had a lot of knockbacks which has made them a bit more realistic. I will see how the comedy goes."

At least he can console himself that the list of previous losers of So You Think You're Funny include such now-famous funny men as Father Ted's Ardal O'Hanlon, Johnny Vegas, Ed Byrne and Dominic Holland. He might yet have the last laugh.