SEAN Hughes is a hard man to pin down.

It's not that he's constantly dodging around - indeed, he seems to move quite slowly - it's more that he's a mass of contradictions.

Wherever you look - in his personal life, his professional life and, most of all, his material - any theme you think you can grab hold of quickly slips away and you're left with no clearer idea of the man than you had at the very beginning.

Take his latest live show, his first stand-up for eight years. There's a bit of tongue-in-cheek whimsy about age and family and coping with both, there's dark, surreal stuff that could only come from a twisted mind, there's some near-the-knuckle routines that almost, but not quite, cause a sharp intake of breath.

And yet everything is delivered with such a twist of vulnerability and charm that you leave thinking you've seen a cuddly entertainer with a roguish twinkle in his eye. Which is the last thing he wants you to think.

"To me an all-round entertainer is no ambition for a grown man," he scoffs. "That's why I left Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

"It was a great show, and not to belittle it, but it really required only one brain cell. And panel shows get you into places you never want to go. A few weeks ago I was asked if I'd like to go on Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing! It was confirmation that nobody has any idea what I stand for."

Which is why he's returning to stand-up. After Buzzcocks, he starred in ITV's Sunday evening drama The Last Detective as Peter Davidson's sidekick and appeared in As You Like It in London's West End for four months.

Towards the end of both, he started throwing in ad libs and found they got a great response. He suddenly remembered how much fun he had writing his own funny stuff. Warm-up gigs proved he still had it in him, but he found a brand-new audience waiting for his gags.

"It was weird, I had people coming to see me via so many different routes - those who know me as the voice of Rubber Dubbers, fans of The Last Detective, Buzzcocks devotees and people who saw my stand-up last time round." He sounds genuinely bemused at his new-found range.

"At my first warm-up there was an 11-year-old kid in front row. I warned the parents - I'll take it easy in the first half, but I'll go hardcore in second act. When I came back after the interval, they'd gone." He grins. "So I let rip."

You get the sense that this comes from lengthy personal experience. Hughes has a history of changing course just as everything seems calm and successful.

In 1990, he became the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival. His surreal show - set in his flat with Samuel Beckett phoning throughout the evening - swiftly became a Channel 4 sitcom and Hughes was on the verge of household name success.

"After two series they wanted me to do more, but I toured the show and the audience was all 14-year-old girls who knew I was off the telly," he shrugs.

"They'd scream and they weren't interested in the material. Autograph sessions lasted longer than the show. I hated it."

For a poor, working class Irish kid, the attention was too much to handle.

"I used to be a trolley boy in a supermarket when I was a kid to earn extra money," he grins. "My parents would have been happy if that was the career I went on to pursue. But I was obsessed with stand-up after seeing Richard Pryor Live In Concert on video, so I worked in London and gigged at the Comedy Store without them knowing."

When stand-up delivered an audience who cared more about his telly status than his gags, he went the other way.

His material became darker and he started writing novels and poetry. Buzzcocks came along and it paid so well he could afford to venture up narrow creative paths. As people started to recognise him, saying you're the fellow from the Buzzcocks' he realised he really didn't want that on my tombstone.

"The thing is, when I started out I was full of young comic ambition," he explains. "Young comics just want to succeed. Now I'm older I've still got the ambition, but it's the ambition to do something really good."

Sean Hughes is at the Tivoli Theatre, Wimborne on Thursday, February 8 at 8pm. Call 01202 885566 for bookings and full details.