FOLLOWING two sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Festival and a hugely successful UK tour, star of C4’s Stand Up For The Week Simon Evans brings his critically acclaimed show Leashed to Lighthouse in Poole next week.

Like most men of his age and delusion, Simon Evans dreams of striking out into The Wild and slipping the surly bonds of suburbia.

He remembers, inaccurately, a youth spent drifting like a Home Counties Kerouac through the great European arterial transport thoroughfares, bonding, if not with tribal herdsmen, then at least with truck drivers and the occasional foreign legionnaire deserter.

Living on his wits, coping Britishly with strange and confusing sexual advances, and waking up each day with the sunrise, no matter how carefully he attempted to construct some kind of rudimentary curtaining around his head before turning in for the night on some dismal piece of disregarded municipal verge or other. He remembers, and he yearns.

So what does Simon do, in an effort to reconnect with the spontaneity of his former, unburdened self? He buys a dog.

Lighthouse spokeswoman Susie Carver said: “Come and hear what will be at the very least a useful corrective to the growing swell of earnest middle class ‘wilderness’ literature written by men who tramp off into the woods to spend the night in the root bole of a storm-toppled fir and are able to tell you what kind of owl it was that that did that on them, as if that’s any kind of way for a grown up to behave.”

A familiar voice on BBC Radio 4, Simon is a regular on The News Quiz, The Unbelievable Truth, Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive and anchored and wrote seven series of the news satire The Way It Is.

Evans has appeared on numerous TV shows including Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, The Apprentice: You’re Fired! and Mock the Week.

He is also a prolific writer for radio and TV, his credits including Not Going Out and 8 Out Of 10 Cats among many others.

The show is at Lighthouse in Poole on March 15 at 8pm. Call 0844 406 8666 or visit lighthousepoole.co.uk