I like my comedy...to be something a bit new: Phil Nichol

Phil Nichol described his style hitherto as ‘stupid, rude, puerile, fast and silly’. "But maybe you hated me for being loud and obnoxious?" he tells us (politely alluding to a scathing review The Skinny gave him in March). "Maybe now you won’t."

Nichol’s been around the circuit for donkey’s years but he’s in our ‘something new’ category because he’s moving away from his normal style to a selection of quiet songs and deadpan one liners. "It’s something that’s been brewing since 2002" he told us. "I used to live with Carey Marx and he dared me to do 20 minutes of deadpan material. It went quite well but since then I've had a more storytelling style. I've always wanted to develop it into an hour’s show, though."

On top of his experiments in deadpan, Nichol is engaging in some theatre this year, featuring in Gagarin Way, along with Bruce Morton, Jim Muir and Will Andrews and School for Scandal, with Stephen K Amos, Marcus Brigstocke and others.