Slak's comedy evening. An intimate affair. There's no big stage. Just a mini platform at the side of the room amidst a cluster of tables.

This monthly event has been going for a couple of years now - and has attracted such names as Reginald D. Hunter and Jimmy Carr. It seems this is one of those places that people stop off at before they become huge. Which bodes well for a band called the Vintage Chimps. I interviewed them in here a couple of weeks ago.

I say the magic words: "I'm from the BBC" and am welcomed into the backstage area - or, in this case, a long corridor with a cramped room full of left over furniture. That's showbiz!

Here, squashed between a doorway and an leopard-skin amplifier, I am introduced to Harry Denford, who is engrossed in his newspaper. He is soon joined by Nick, the compere for this evening's entertainment, then a bedraggled looking Noel James and finally Hills Barker.

Harry Denford:

Harry, a mild manner man off stage, is a monster on it. He plays the part of a "Saarf Landun Fat Bloke" and does it very well. Although if he carries on with his Atkins Diet, he may well only perform the "Saarf Landun" bit accurately.

His routine features gags about the need for frosted glass on aeroplane toilets: "Who's going to see you at that height?" and Blackpool guest houses: "They said treat the place like your home, so I pebble dashed it and stuck a satellite dish on the roof." He is also keen on audience participation. At one point he tries to turn the sedate Cheltenham bar into a South London pub by getting audience members to shout "Do you want some?" At each other. He is unimpressed by the results, calling them pathetic Montpellier boys.

This man is funny. Before the show, and in between glances at his newspaper, he tells me that Hale of Hale and Pace was one of his school teachers. It was through being allowed to sneak into his performances that Harry became interested in comedy. Following redundancy from an airline, he decided to devote his life to comedy, and Harry the hardball was born.

Noel James:

Across the room from me (a distance of about a metre at the most), is slumped Noel James. He looks exhausted - as well he might. He has just returned from Edinburgh where he was performing at the festival, before taking a holiday up there. He stopped off at Manchester on his way here and, almost the moment his act finishes, he's off again: this time to Swansea.

"How was Edinburgh," someone asks him.

"Very Scottish," he replies.

Unlike his two colleagues for the evening, Noel is busily cracking jokes backstage almost as often as he on stage - almost all of them are puns. Terrible puns. Puns so terrible that you have no choice but to laugh. But more of them later.

Edinburgh, apart from being "very Scottish" was a chance for Noel to do something he really loves: sketches. While he bemoans the competitiveness that is let loose up there, he still enjoys it, even if it is a headache preparing for shows and doing all your own advertising. He seems pleased to be approaching some kind of normality again.

On stage, the puns keep pouring out of Noel like their going out of fashion. Which, of course, they always have been. It's easy to see why he refers to Spike Milligan as one of his heroes. "My name is, in fact, Noel Wyn James," he announces to the audience at the beginning of his act. "But the 'In Fact' is silent." At another point he tells us he did a degree in ballet: "I got a 2:2."

And so they keep coming. Noel James is a pun factory, constantly messing with words until you think there's no more word to mess with. Forget Richard Whiteley (and most people would like to): Noel James certainly keeps the pun-ters happy.

Hills Barker:

Next up is Hills Barker. Well, that's not strictly true. From the audience's point of view, she's the second on stage. But for me, she will always be the last of tonight's comedians because, well, I meet her and interview her last.

She too has just returned from a stint at Edinburgh where she was performing a series of sketches under the unimaginative title (her words, not mine) of "Bright Sparks". She took the opportunity while up in Scotland to review her work, seeing what was good and what was bad. Now she's in a predicament, flicking rapidly through a book of notes, wondering if anything's good enough.

She need not worry. Her set is excellent. She appears on stage with a guitar and announces, in a thick Irish accent that she's going to sing a song about her family. It is a comically dirgeful sound and she, as much as everyone else, is relieved to slip back into her proper South Eastern accent when the song is over.

"I just did that," she explains. "Because the other night someone shouted at me and told me I looked with Sinead O'Connor. Which is clearly a lie. As I actually look like a 12 year old boy."

Petite, she may be, but a twelve year old boy, she certainly is not.

Her act consists of a lot of political comment, so obviously the Hutton Enquiry gets a mention - or two. As does the war in Iraq in general. She also suggests that what the world really needs in order to achieve lasting piece is a large theme park. It's a controversial suggestion. But it might yet work.

Her act is not just based around the current political climate, though. There's flippant things about day to day existence too: fake Latino singers with their limited Spanish vocabulary, playing LPs at the wrong speed and the super hero like quality of women. Well, that's what she thinks anyway.

After her set, I get a chance to find out more about her. She was a member of a comedy group at Oxford ("Yeah, ok. I went to Oxford," she says hiding behind her hands. "I know what you're thinking."). From there the group went to the Edinburgh Fringe to perform sketches and later, when they disbanded, she was asked if she would consider doing stand up.

And so here she is.

I ask her why she thinks that more women aren't involved in comedy. Her immediate answer is confidence. It takes bottles and bottles of the stuff to get on stage and perform, often touring the country relentlessly. This, she points out, puts a lot of women off.

There is another view, I suggest: women are too practically minded. At first she dismisses this. "Well, I'm not practically minded." But after some consideration she is open to this idea. Statistically, she points out, more men suffer breakdowns than women. So perhaps there is something of a correlation there. You only need to look at the careers of Spike Milligan, Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock to see this theory borne into reality.

In the meantime, Hills is pursuing her dreams as a comedian. She feels offended by the people who say that women can't be funny, but she does not strike you as the sort of person who is just doing it to prove everyone wrong. Hills Barker is a comedian, and an excellent comedian at that, because she is good at it.

At the moment, she is looking forward to the broadcasting of a new four part series for Radio 4 called "Radio 9", starting on October 27. She has been working on with Johnny Daukes. It is, she says "like real radio, but surreal". Using documentary and interview styles it is recorded without the aid of an audience, and promises to be very funny.

This seems to be more in the line of what Hills would like to move into. "You can only do the stand up circuit for so long," she says. "It's hard work. Ideally, I'd like a long stint at a theatre and do other things the rest of the time."

Meanwhile, she seems happy to be doing the touring for now. Fresh from Edinburgh, she's off to do a tour of Ireland and the North of England. If she's anywhere near as popular there as she is in Cheltenham tonight, she'll do very well.

And with that, I leave. Harry's very nearly finished his act, but I've got no time to hang around. A bus is waiting for me on the Promenade. You'd have thought the bus company would consult comedy venues before arranging their timetables, wouldn't you?

02/09/03 - First published on www.bbc.co.uk/gloucestershire