THE amiable Les Dennis, who to my mind always looks like the bloke in accounts with a wife, two kids, a granny and a caravan, rather than a stage star, has a certain affinity with the hapless soul he plays in Just Between Ourselves.

In the Alan Ayckbourn comedy, which arrives at Malvern Theatres on Tuesday, July 2, he headlines as a DIY fanatic, incapable of fixing anything, least of all his disastrously fractured marriage.

Swiftly skirting over the marriage bit, because Les has had some well publicised problems there, it's the DIY angle that causes him to grin and nod.

"Don't ask me to fix anything," he laughed. "I've had a number of DIY disasters. Probably the most embarrassing was when I spent all morning carefully fixing a new row of coat hooks.

"I'd got them level. The right distance from end to end. All that. But when I put a coat on one to try it out, it slid straight off.

"I'd put the hook bits on upside down!"

It's the sort of thing they'd have done in that madcap TV show Russ Abbot's Madhouse, which was where Les first made his name after winning the talent show New Faces.

For a while he enjoyed a very successful comedy duo with Dustin Gee and many folk will remember that with affection too, so it's rather sad the partnership has been airbrushed out of the Les Dennis CV.

Like his marriage, it is another area that remains off limits.

Nevertheless, he is a man of many parts, having taken a lead in the award winning West End musical Me and My Girl, appeared in Brookside, performed both drama and comedy on television and, of course, hosts Family Fortunes, which he insists is unscripted.

Just Between Ourselves is a double first for Les. The first time he's been to Malvern and the first time he's appeared in an Ayckbourn play.

That can't be said of his co-star Jean Boht, a familiar figure on stage in both Malvern and Worcester, who plays his ghastly mother.

"Really Jean's a lovely person," he insisted. "She must be to put up with me."

Described as "an Ayckbourn classic", Just Between Ourselves, was a huge hit when first performed in 1976 and is considered a masterful look at English suburban life.

It plays Malvern Festival Theatre from Tuesday, July 2 until Saturday July 6 and tickets are £18-£10. Box office 01684 892277.