For years Milton Jones has been honing his comic skills. Now he’s taking on his biggest challenge yet. Roz Laws reports.

Comedians may seem a jovial bunch, but joke theft is considered a deadly serious matter.

At the centre of a recent row was Keith Chegwin, accused of posting gags on Twitter and claiming them as his own.

One of them was: “My auntie Marge has been ill for so long we changed her name to ‘I can’t believe she’s not better’.”

But several other comedians were quick to point out that the jokes had been written by other people, and that that one-liner belonged to Milton Jones.

An unapologetic Cheggers denied stealing from the likes of Milton, Jimmy Carr and Lee Mack.

Milton maintained a dignified silence throughout the bitter public battle, but now he has spoken out about the vexed issue of plagiarism among comedians.

“I stayed out of it because you don’t want to be known as the whinging comic,” he says.

“I let my friends stick up for me. But the cheek of it was Chegwin saying that he had written the jokes himself. I don’t know how he was planning to get away with that.

“Where I draw the line is if people are making money out of someone else’s work. That’s wrong.

“There are certain acts who are jukeboxes of other people’s material, which is frustrating.

“Sometimes it comes to blows and people refuse to work with each other and appear on the same bill.

“It’s a bit of a minefield. People contact me with jokes they’ve written, but I tell them I’m not even going to read them. Partly because it’s usually dreadful racist nonsense, but also because if I then use anything like it in my act, they’ll say I nicked it.

“In music, record companies would take someone to court for plagiarism, but comedians are so hopelessly unorganised into any sort of structure or union that a punch in the face is the best we can do!”

Milton, along with Tim Vine, is the king of the one-liner. He first came to wider prominence through radio, recording eight Radio 4 series including The Very World Of Milton Jones.

In fact in a survey, when asked who they would like to hear more of, Radio 4 listeners listed Milton as the only living person in their top 10.

He seems to have suddenly become more famous, thanks to appearances on TV shows like Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and Mock The Week, but he’s been around for almost 20 years. He won the Perrier Newcomer award in 1996.

The 46-year-old Londoner has built up such a solid fan base that his current Lion Whisperer tour has doubled in size, from 40 to 80 dates.

“It feels like I’m at the bottom of Mount Everest, looking up,” he says. “I know what I’m going to be doing almost every night for the next five months.