“Stand-up comedy does not work on the small screen”. It’s one of the glib truisms of television and its timorous gatekeepers, the executives, the commisioners, the controllers. Look around you. Yes, there are hundreds of stand-up comedians on television. But none of them are actually doing stand-up comedy. They are playing panel games, and hosting late night shows, and playing pranks on the public, or advertising insurance, with their funny faces. TV types think of stand-ups as versatile everymen, ideal for the era of cheap multichannel filler, more talented and adaptable than the average dedicated TV presenter, and pathetically grateful to be working. But they would rather send them to learn how to row, or cook alongside a celebrity chef, than allow them to do what they are good at. This mistreatment of the artform belittles the real strengths of stand-up – initimacy, duality of meaning, toying with taste and taboo, cross referencing between routines spread around over timeslots way beyond the standard TV half hour, and taking the risks that a relationship built on mutual trust between audience and performer in a live environment allows. Thus, the more individual and distinctive a stand-up talent is, the more they embody the possibilities of the medium of stand-up itself, the less likely it appears they are to be squeezed effectively into the box. I once took a Channel 4 executive to see a comedian I wanted to try and produce something for at a small theatre in South London. “That was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen,” he said. “But what could you do with it?” And that was that.

Stand-up comedy does not work on television, they say. But who are they? They are the television people, and they commissioned Eldorado. But I am a stand-up comedian. And I would like to work on television. God knows I tried. I attempted the panel game circuit. The woman doing publicity for my forthcoming Edinburgh show lobbied to get me on one, and the money was attractive with a new baby, and so I found myself sat at the end of a line of comedians in a TV studio, having been warned of the topics that would be covered. The lights came up and I felt myself go blank. The situation seemed to have no relation to anything I had ever done before. Time passed. I waited patiently and quietly for the show to be over. Everyone else managed. I only said one thing, which was about the production company who made the programme, and had been in trouble recently for their handling of Celebrity Big Brother, which they also make, and which I had been invited to ridicule for the entertainment of the crowd. The host, who I could feel really trying to help me out, noted that, after four series of the programme, he considered what I had just said to be the least likely comment to reach the final edit of anything any guest had ever contributed. A few days later, in Galway, a man explained he had tried to get rid of his tickets to my gig having seen me on the television panel show.

Nonetheless, it was a great honour, earlier this year, to be voted the 41st greatest stand-up of all time by a public vote on the internationally respected Channel 4 TV station, makers of Balls Of Steel and Celebrity Big Brother, and indeed I have named my new stand-up show 41st Best Stand-Up Ever in recognition of this. But it’s not an accolade that comes with any paid broadcasting work attached to it. Having spent my life being praised for not selling out, I’d now love to find a way of buying in, but my performance on the panel games clearly proves this is not an option for me. Can we just do some stand-up, that thing that doesn’t work on television? Increasingly, nothing works on television, – even simple phone-ins have become too complicated to administrate without causing a scandal, – so why single stand-up out as a potential problem?

The reason why stand-up has been problematic for television is because it is one of the High Arts, more comparable to ballet than variety. Stand-up is also a form of Magik, in which the adept alters the world around him by force of will. The timing of a good comic is an instinctive form of alchemy that charges dead silences with electric potential, and wards off Evil. And the length of a pause, and the slightest nuance of vocal phrasing, and impercepitble shifts in volume are all tools that can utterly change the quality of an idea as it is being expressed, and summon Angels. Television timing is fictional, assembled in editing suites by computerised editing machines that can close and extend gaps, and move responses around, operated by men taking drugs to stay awake, who have long since ceased to find anything but The Friday Night Project funny.

Television drama, and television comedy, tend to represent the forms at their most basic. Where Television sledgehammers ideas home, stand-up can drip feed them deliciously, over time, and toy with multiplicities of meaning. No-one trusts Television, as the head of BBC1 has just realised. Viwers assume the stand-up’s skill is a post-production construct, and how can anyone pursue ideas with possible multiplicities of nuanced meaning to audiences already degraded by the crass cruelty of Big Brother or the childlike certainties of Trevor MacDonald and his infantile ITV news? The way to get stand-up to work on television is by using creative techniques to re-establish something television has become rather bad at – gaining the trust of the viewer.

At text book example of how not to film stand-up was Ben Elton’s TV series from earlier this year, which broke monologues down into dialogues in which his partner, Alexa Chung, was a largely silent partner, and located the comedian in a kind of news programme set, which only served to heighten the artificiallity of the whole process. Ben Elton has set the cause of stand-up on TV back years. He should have looked back to Dave Allen, sat in a chair, with a slow burning cigarette, back in the days when TV production values were so simple that you had no reason to do anything but trust what you were watching.

I filmed my commercially released 2005 DVD, Stand-Up Comedian, at The Stand in Glasgow, and it’s fucking great. I had an idea that being able to film in a small club, surrounded on three sides by the crowd, and catching their reacting faces and laughter, or their disapproval, in the same shot as me, in real time, with no harsh edits, would help capture the effect of watching magik worked in real time. Most filmed stand-up is in big spaces, with jarring cuts away to non-real time laughs. The mood is broken. It looks like a construct. But the production company filming the dvd wanted me to use The Bloomsbury Theatre in London, not the neat little space of The Stand, in order to save money. I said I thought most stand-upon film didn’t look very good and I wanted to try something different. The executive producer of the DVD, who has made many live stand-up films, said there was no point worrying about it as ‘stand-up always looks shit on film’, so I should just try and save as much of the production costs as possible, presumably to maximise profits.

But I insisted. And I’m really proud of my little stand-up film. I’ve got a BBC2 pilot in the Autumn. Of a stand-up show. It won’t work of course.