Circuit Training 4a: Fuckula Gets Festive

We're rapidly approaching Edinburgh season, the most nerve-wracking time of year for those comics itching to bring their talents to a wider audience and escape the rigours of the regular circuit (i.e., all of them). It's also by far their most expensive time of year, new house-buyers excepted, as the average August-long show at comedy's annual cattle market will cost anything from seven to ten grand. You could buy a nice semi on the outskirts of Middlesbrough for that.

For James Dowdeswell - still best known to armchair fans for his short but memorable role as Count Fuckula in Ricky Gervais' Extras - this summer will be a little different. He's all-but avoiding the usual worries about attracting audiences and impressing TV talent spotters to concentrate instead on a very different type of festival. Having recently enjoyed a lengthy busman's holiday in Australia the Bristol-born comic is spending the back-end of July doing likewise at various music festivals, while most of his peers fret over their Edinburgh sets, and will head up to Scotland when he's good and ready.

"I'm just doing a week," he says, mid-munch of a bacon sarnie in a favourite Soho café. "I went out to Melbourne for three months, so that took up most of my finances for this year. To go there, then come back here and do a full show, it's nuts, so I'm doing the five pound fringe - which is a really good thing. I'm doing a week, and so far I've spent £250. No, that's a lie. With getting up there and back I think my expenditure is £310..."

Dowdeswell eventually hits Edinburgh in week four, by which time the majority of his peers will be staggering up Princes Street like the dead-eyed creations of George A Romero. He does have a proper show lined up though - When I Grew Up I Wanted to be Kenny Everett and Other Stories - and the operative word there is the last one.

The erudite stand-up is keen on "sharpening my storytelling skills" at the moment, which probably has a fair bit to do with his girlfriend, Melbourne-born comic Sarah Bennetto. She runs a regular event called Storytellers' Club, at which comedians, musicians and other minor celebs get up and, well, tell stories. And she'll be running one at Lulworth Castle's rather good Camp Bestival this weekend (24-26 July 2009), which is handy for music buff Dowdeswell. He's the Storytellers' Club's resident opener, and so will then be free to head off and peruse Florence and the Machine or whoever at his leisure.

"It's at a burlesque tent, in the morning," beams the comic, who is actually quite enthused about his missus' project, rather than just using it for the wristband. "For me it's fantastic. You can tell a story that doesn't need to be chasing the punchlines. It doesn't need to be funny, it can be poignant, it can be anything - you can concentrate on the actual story and being a comic you'll probably make it funny anyway. A lot of comics who do it are quite nervous, but they come back."

"I'm going to tell a story about going to an audition for Fanta. It's true. I got an email saying 'submit yourself for the role' as they wanted someone wild and wacky to be the new face of Fanta. So I clicked on and they literally phoned me back within five minutes saying 'hello, we've just seen your photo. You look suitably ridiculous,' and asked me to come in the next morning. So I thought 'how can I be wild and wacky?' and Sarah suggested I go in on an orange spacehopper..."

Cue an afternoon full of ups and downs. Comedy tents at music festivals can be a little daunting for many comics but they're a home-from-home for Dowdeswell, who began his career at the "quite raucous" Ashton Court fest alongside fellow Bristolian Russell Howard. Indeed, the regular stand-up stage wasn't his preferred route into comedy, early on.

"When I started I wanted to be a scriptwriter," he says. "I wrote loads of scripts but they weren't good enough so I've done stand-up for a number of years, and now I'm back working on scripts again, having developed my writing style a lot more. When I look back on those early scripts they were quite immature and deserved not to be made..."

It would have been nice to hear the full horrors of those early efforts but at this point the café falls silent as the aforementioned, very distinctive Florence swans in, hovers next to our table looking bemused for a minute then drags off some indie blokes sitting behind us. "They must the Machine," ponders Dowdeswell, and returns to his buttie, presumably contemplating the backstage hanging-out to come. Life could be worse.

Coming Soon: Part Two of Si's bacon-fuelled chat with James Dowdeswell: the repercussions of that short but memorable role in Extras, a novel approach to getting back on the telly, and his impressive comedy ancestry: On the Buses and everything.