DON'T worry if you can't get a seat in Worcester to see Barry Cryer on his farewell tour - you can guarantee he'll be back.

It's typical of the man styled 'King of the One Liner', that he bills his outing The First Farewell Tour when we know - and he knows - he has absolutely no intention of bringing the curtain down on a spectacularly successful career.

"You don't retire in our business," he quips. "The phone just stops ringing."

Barry says he plans to keep "surging on".

"My wife thinks I'm mad but I enjoy it. Anyway I'm not away from home for weeks on end - I've done all that - this is just one night here, one night there and I do after dinners and stuff so I'm pretty busy, but it's a night at a time.

"I really enjoy it as it is, but I'd get a bit homesick if I was away from home a lot," he said.

Barry's June 9 appearance will see him at Huntingdon Hall doing what he does best - delivering a series of jokes and anecdotes, with the second half's topics being provided by audience members themselves.

A bucket will be placed in the hall's entrance into which people can place a piece of paper upon which they have written a suggested topic.

Barry then plans to demonstrate his ability to tell a joke or anecdote about any of the subjects he draws from said bucket.

Risky stuff - unless you're Barry Cryer that is.

Anyone who has heard him, at the very least on Radio 4's long-running 'antidote to panel games' I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, knows that such off-the-cuff stuff is second nature to him.

Ask him from where he thinks this sustained ability to create laughter instantly and from anything and his prompt answer is: "I don't know.

"I've never analysed it, I just do it. I can't take any credit for it, it's just there. You hope it works, it doesn't always but most of the time it does - touch wood - but that's my favourite part of the show."

A small element of danger maybe - but minimal when you've been at the top of the professional tree for as long as Barry Cryer has.

Whenever a tribute programme is made to some outstanding comic great or a TV show is run under the 'comedy classic' banner, his name - or face - figures somewhere.

Never mind that he is keeping us laughing today, you'll find his name associated with the best in British comedy, either as writer or co-performer, going back decades.

Morecambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper are just three comedy giants for whom he's written in a distinguished career which he charts as beginning in 1956 with his first paid job at the City Varieties Theatre in his home town of Leeds.

"I'd been in the student show at the old Empire Theatre and Stanley Joseph, who used to run the City Varieties with his brother Michael, always went to see the student show and if he liked anybody he'd offer them work, and he offered me a week's work which was total culture shock," he recalls.

"You'd been showing off in front of your friends and family for charity at one theatre and then it was the hard real world at the other theatre - so that was a real baptism."

Originally there was no ambition to write professionally but, Barry recalls, he and fellow university students wrote and did their own shows.

"It was about 1960 and by then I was down in London," he recalled.

"I was in a bedsitter in Bayswater and a guy upstairs called Douglas Camfield - who later became a successful director, but was working as a floor manager at the BBC - knocked on my door and said 'what are you doing?'

"I said 'what does it look as if I'm doing - not much' and he said 'they're crying out for sketches for this particular show,'"

So the two teamed up to write some material and were all accepted - which Barry says has never happened since - and suddenly he was a television writer.

"It was a complete accident - my life's been a series of lucky accidents really," he says.

It has, in fact, turned full circle with many of today's comedians writing their own material.

"The world changed, my phone stopped ringing and I thought 'mm, this is interesting'," says Barry.

"I started as a performer and now I've gone back to it. Most of my work is performing now, not writing and the live stuff is the best - that's the root of our business."

See a comic master in action at Huntingdon Hall on June 9, beginning at 8pm. Tickets cost £12 (concessions £10) and can be booked on 01905 611427.