@ Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on Fri 13 Mar 2015 (and touring)

There’s something admirable about Graham Fellows, the man behind John Shuttleworth – the way he has plugged away with this unpromising character, this deluded, old, bedroom songwriter, to become a Radio 4 fixture and a provincial theatre stalwart. Forged in a chummier, weirder era, a time of Frank Sidebottom and The Greatest Show on Legs, Shuttleworth has survived waves of comedy fashion to become a nugget of old time showmanship in the age of the Vine-and-Twitter brigade.

True to form, everyone at the Queens’ Hall gets what they came for – an ageing Bontempi troubadour in red turtle neck and brown leather elevating the trivialities of life through song. The tour’s title has been rendered A Wee Ken To Remember by means of a misprint on the poster by his ‘next door neighbour and sole agent’ Ken, forcing Shuttleworth to wax lyrical about his diminutive colleague rather than about unforgettable Saturdays and Sundays.

It’s a hook on which to hang new, even topical, material, including a ditty about Comic Relief, but by the end he has given up shoehorning songs into the shaky narrative, and begun belting out his ‘greatest hits’ – Two Margarines on the Go, Pigeons In Flight, Can’t Go Back To Savoury Now. It is comfortable, lived-in light comedy about everyday trifles. Even the jokes about being out of date are out of date – he’s been told he should be upgrading from tapes to CDs, don’t you know?

But for all Fellows’ hard work with his likeable creation, the modern comedy context in which he finds himself works against him. As a rare Northern English voice in the Oxbridge-stuffed environs of Radio 4 comedy, it’s hard not to feel he’s only been let into the comedy Establishment because he fits their quaint Northern stereotype. Like Alan Bennett, he’s the Yorkshireman it’s OK for the middle classes to like.

So, what once may have brought an affectionate, self-mocking chuckle of recognition in a Barnsley club in 1993, now seems wince-making in an Edinburgh music hall in 2015. Not through his own design, Fellows/Shuttleworth has become complicit in the Wallace-and-Gromitification of Northern England. It makes it hard to laugh when you realise that Shuttleworth is no longer just someone’s deluded, untrendy uncle but the forbearer of such cringeworthy nostalgia numpties as The Lancashire Hotpots.