TV and radio work keeps him off stage

Rhod Gilbert says he’s thinking of quitting stand-up because he’s getting so many offers of TV and radio work.

The comic says he might bow out with a ‘greatest hits’ swan song gig in Cardiff next Christmas.

Gilbert has several TV projects in the pipeline. Tomorrow he records a try-out of a new internet-themed chat show Delete! Delete! Delete!, while a pilot of his long-planned sitcom set in the fictional town of Llanbobl is also in the offing.

He also hosts a regular show on BBC Radio Wales and has been asked to make a fifth series of Work Experience, when he takes on unusual jobs, for BBC Two.

The 45-year-old told Wales Online: ‘The stand-up is getting pushed further and further into the background, to the point where I’ve started to ask myself if I’ll have time to go back to it at all.

‘So instead I thought, “Why not give the duvet sketch, the lost luggage sketch and all that other stuff one last hurrah as a  way of bowing out altogether”?’

He said fans often asked him to revive his best stand-up routines but he finds the idea ‘a bit weird’.

‘It’s different if you’re in a band – it’s almost taken for granted that you’re going to perform your most popular songs – but I could never understand how that would translate to comedy.  Why would anyone want to keep hearing an old joke when they already know the punchline’

Published: 21 Oct 2013