Hugh Dennis shines at the Ledbury Poetry Festival

Dennis, who was interviewed on stage by Jill Abram in the Community Hall on Wednesday, July 5, is not a great fan of Monty Python, it transpired.

But let's not hold that against him. He possesses a quieter, less surreal but still potent sense of comedy, combined with immaculate timing.

The son of a Bishop, he is anything but self-reverential, and often he's self-mocking.

He told his dad: "It's quite embarrassing, in my world, having a father who's a Bishop."

To which his father replied: "It's quite embarrassing, in my world, having a son who's..."

But who is Hugh Dennis? He's famous, of course, as a star of Outnumbered and Mock the Week; but he's also aware of having enjoyed a privileged background. He asked for a recording of Maya Angelou reading "Still I Rise" to be played. It's a powerful poem; with black rights and women's rights as subtexts.

Afterwards Dennis said, almost by way of an explanation for his choice: "I'm a white, middle-class man who went to Cambridge. I haven't had much to overcome."

Earlier, he'd asked for a recording of the Gwendolyn Brooks poem "We Real Cool" to be played. The snappy, semi-serious poem is about black youths apparently wasting their lives in a pool hall, and it ends with the line, "We die soon".

But Dennis, while recognising the serious points the poet wished to make, homed in instinctively on the humour.

He said: "My take on that is that it's fine to be a nerd. I take great comfort from that poem."

Perhaps he's cool in his own way, but perhaps he's too typically English for that.

His humour's often rooted in the suburban everyday, but perhaps one telling little step away from reality.

He told one anecdote about a man driving home who was warned by phone that "one nutter" was going the wrong way down the motorway.

"One nutter?" asks the hapless driver. "I'm seeing thousands of 'em..."

But there's only one Hugh Dennis.