Steve Pratt calls hamster-eating comedian Freddie Starr to talk about his forthcoming appearance in York, but instead hears about a family crisis, having his nodules removed and missing performances.

FREDDIE STARR’S number is engaged when I ring at the allotted time.

Thirty minutes and umpteen fruitless calls later, the number is still busy.

Eventually I get a call from his manager, saying that Starr is off the phone and waiting for my call now.

I ring the number again. Starr answers. The man who caused the classic headline FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER to be written. “I’ve been waiting for your call for two weeks,” he says. It’s the most sensible sentence I hear over the course of the next 40 minutes as the comedian pours out his woes with the occasional chorus of “Mmm...” or “a-ha” from me. I could, I think, have put the receiver down, gone away and made a cup of tea, come back and found Starr still talking, oblivious to my absence.

Freddie Starr, you might say, ate my interview.

I forget the first question I asked, but it triggered a very long, very complicated story that he opened with the intriguing sentence “I got locked up”. It’s difficult to repeat the story because (a) it is very long, (b) it is very muddled and (c) most of it would probably see one or both of us in court if repeated.

The elements seem to involve his wife (with whom he does not appear to be living), his laptop, seeing his young daughter and a criminal lawyer. There’s enough story strands to keep a soap afloat for a month. I feel more like a psychiatrist listening to a patient or a judge listening to the evidence as he rambles more than a group of walkers on the coast-to-coast route.

As he tells me that “women know how to press buttons”, I’m desperately trying to find a button to get him back on track and talk about his forthcoming appearance at York Grand Opera House.

He is a man who doesn’t know when to shut up.

He tells me as much, pointing out that he always gives the press a story.

“Those who hate the press are not playing the game,” he suggests.

“You have to have the press with you, whether they’re writing good or bad. That’s the way it goes.

“If you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you know how to play the game. You might as well give them something. I always give them a bit of a story.”

Divorce is mentioned and he gets serious, proclaiming that “you know when you love somebody, you forgive them. And we can’t pick and choose who we fall in love with.

When you love somebody you forgive them and keep forgiving them”.

Suddenly, there’s a brief gap in the one-sided conversation with this Starr-crossed lover. I manage to stutter something about touring.

He says he’s semi-retired and just works when he wants to work.

UNFORTUNATELY, he reverts to his previous story (“I said to the police...”) momentarily before the word York triggers a memory. The theatre management themselves have a memory – of Starr missing a performance last time he was booked. I get the feeling Starr remembers this too. “I was ill, not ill as in ill I couldn’t work,” he explains. “I had nodules on my vocal chords which had to be taken off and removed. The Chinese man who did the operation cut under my chin and went in that way. He said, ‘do you do impressions?’. He said you have to twist your vocal chords to sound like somebody else.”

He hates being ill and letting people down. He also hates theatre managers who complain about him being ill and letting people down. “You’re not allowed to be ill. You have to bring a death certificate and they might believe you’re ill,” he says.

The Grand Opera House was “fairly full” for the second night’s performance. “People thought I might not turn up. I will,” he promises.

As to what they will see if they/he turn up, Starr refers to what others think. “People say I am working a lot better than I used to work when I was younger and in my heyday.

I used to fill theatres out twice nightly. Same thing as Lee Evans is doing today.”

But he can’t leave the missing a show thing lie.

“I don’t wake up in the morning and think I don’t want to go,” he says. “If you come on and do a substandard show, people say, ‘I’m not going to see him again’. I’ve learnt it’s best not to perform that way.”

HE now proceeds – and I really don’t know how we got on to this subject – to tell me about an abcess on his tooth. It was, by all accounts, “very painful – I was banging my head against the wall”.

His dentist was on holiday and, after three days of pain and no treatment, his face had swollen up like a balloon. “It was so big, I looked like the Elephant Man,” he adds. Eventually, he found a dentist to pull out the infected tooth.

I ask if he’s thought about retiring – he’s 66 – although by this point I’d have settled for him just being quiet for a minute.

“I just love performing,” he says, then spoils it all by changing the subject yet again to tell me about his partial knee replacement.

On that occasion, he was back working after eight weeks, although advised to take six months off. Not that anyone thanked him for it.

Certainly not those managers who complain if he’s ill. Nodules, knee, teeth. This was becoming more like something a health writer should be doing. Miraculously, we arrive back on the how you thought about retirement question. “I love making people laugh and smile and that,”

he says. “I have had my day. I know I’m not as big as I used to be. I don’t need anyone to tell me that.

It happens to everybody.

“People say, ‘why aren’t you on TV?’ and I say because they don’t do my sort of shows any more. They want younger comedians so you are on the scrapheap.” He is busy performing in Australia, Dubai, New Zealand and the US. And York, I remind him. “Where Dick Turpin and his girlfriend, Mary, came from,” he says. “Mary loved Dick...” I felt this was the right time to make my excuses and leave.

Freddie Starr – knee, teeth and nodules permitting – is at York Grand Opera House on Thursday. Tickets 0844-847-2322 or at grandoperahouseyork.org.uk