When Jim Davidson wants to cheer himself up, he reads the papers. “There’s nothing funnier than the news,” the veteran comedian tells me. “I just saw a headline, ‘Starmer to put pressure on the Kremlin’. He couldn’t put pressure on a mattress. He’s a gift for comedians. I played Grimsby on Saturday and when I mentioned his name, the audience all booed. They see Labour as turncoats. They’re desperate for Reform.”

Jim, 71, goes on, “The only reason I haven’t joined Reform UK is I’m a member of the Carlton Club” – the Mayfair members-only Conservative club – “and I don’t want to be banned like my mate Lee Anderson was.”

Reform’s recent rift with MP Rupert Lowe didn’t surprise Jim. “Rupert is his own man with his own ideas. He’d make a great independent MP, but having Rupert in Reform was like having me in a sitcom or in EastEnders. I’d end up, telling them what they were doing wrong. Nigel Farage is doing a grand job.”

Davidson’s love-life has seen more twists and turns than a fairground Waltzer. He has been renting a cottage in Hampshire since splitting from fifth wife Michelle Cotton in 2023. But Jim, once TV’s Mr Saturday Night, sounds as glum as Rachel Reeves at the dispatch box when we start chatting. “I’ve had to move the date of my wedding,” he grumbles. “It’s going to be March next year now. I mucked up. I had a place in Hamble-le-Rice. It’s quirky, I like it, but it’s too small for two, the kitchen’s too small. Debbie Arnold told me about a bigger house just round the corner, and so I told my landlord I was moving out next month. Then the other place fell through. So now I’m going to be homeless.”

Not quite. Jim’s moving to Weybridge, Surrey, where his glamorous bride-to-be, Natasha, 48, resides. Luckily “the future ex-Mrs Davidson”, as he jokingly calls her, is understanding. South-London-raised Natasha recently joined his TV subscription channel Ustreme, co-presenting Girl Talk with the aforementioned former EastEnders star Debbie Arnold.

Ustreme, which is awash with old-school comedy favourites like Freddie Starr, Jethro and the much bluer Chubby Brown, is growing too slowly for Jim’s liking. “I don’t have enough money to promote it correctly. I’d need to spend a quarter of a million quid a week on advertising to do that.”

His old employers, the BBC, have not helped. “The BBC have point blank refused to do a deal for me to show old episodes of Big Break or The Generation Game on Ustreme. So my own shows can’t appear on my channel, even though I’m offering to pay for them. It’s politically motivated obviously…”

Jim blames leftwing BBC executives for engineering his 2002 departure. “A new head of light entertainment came in and said, ‘Why have we got this ghastly working-class Conservative on our channel?’ They cancelled two series I was contracted to do and gave me a million quid to go away…” He waits a beat and adds, “It paid for two more marriages, and a new boat.”

Davidson’s conversion to card-carrying Conservatism began with Baroness Thatcher “one of the greatest Prime Ministers we ever had” and the Falklands Campaign. New leader Kemi Badenoch disappoints him though – “she’s made no impact, you’d expect a new leader to create a bounce in the polls.” Jim wasn’t impressed by former Prime Minister Liz Truss either. “I met her, she reminded me of Mavis from Coronation Street,” he smiles. Of the current government, he says “They mean well, they just don’t know how to do it. I just think they’re not very good. They all look like civil servants. Most of them have never had real jobs.”

Jim, who entertained British forces for decades and founded veterans’ charity Care After Combat, is scathing about sabre-rattling politicians calling for British troops to police a Ukraine peace deal. “What are we going to do when our one remaining tank that’s ready for action needs an MOT? Politicians have run defence spending into the ground.”

Television leans heavily to the left, he feels. “Ben Elton proved you could be a comedian without being funny. We did a gig together years ago in the-then Prince of Wales’s back garden and he died on his arse. The only one laughing was the Prince of Wales. I wanted us to do a tour together, left vs right, so his audiences could hear that there’s a funnier alternative.”

Growing up on a southeast London council estate in Kidbrooke, Jim was impressed by Dave Allen and inspired by near-the-knuckle blue-collar stand-up comedians like Jimmy “Kinnel” Jones and Peter Demmer. Of the newer breed, he rates Peter Kay, “he seems very amiable” and “fearless” Jimmy Carr, adding “older people seem to like Micky Flanagan”.

The youngest son of a Glaswegian father and an Irish mother from Cork, Jim’s gift for mimicry took off at St Austin’s boys’ school. “I was about 12, I’d do Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Kenneth Williams… I did a double act with my friend Johnny, we impersonated teachers. Other teachers would ask, ‘Do you do me?’ We’d say no and they’d give us tips on how to impersonate them, I always say this, I always do that…”

Pre-fame, Jim did umpteen jobs, ranging from painting and decorating to selling ice cream. At 19, he entered the Truman Talent Trail, performing at the Barge Pole pub on Thamesmead, before reaching the West End final at the Lyceum. He was 22 when he won his heat on ITV talent show New Faces in 1976. “I rang home and said, ‘Mum, I’ve won New Faces, you’ll never have to work again.’ And she didn’t. On stage I add, ‘the lazy cow’.”

He came second in the final, beaten by ventriloquist Roger de Courcey and Nookie Bear. Later, when de Courcey turned up to their summer season theatre driving a Roller, Jim bought his own and drove his mother Elsie to Eltham bingo hall in it. “She made me drive around the block again so more people would see her arrive. When she told me, I said, right get in the back, I drove around the block a couple of times and when I pulled up, I got out and opened the door for her like a chauffeur.”

Jim’s ITV career encompassed sketch shows, sitcoms, stand-up, and a stint as the fiendish Phantom Flan-Flinger on brilliant Saturday morning kids’ show Tiswas. BBC1 poached him to host snooker game-show Big Break for ten hit series. He then took over The Generation Game for six years, turning it into an anarchic cross between the original show and Tiswas. “It was fantastic. It appealed to all ages, families would watch it together, I didn’t have to be filthy…I’d do it again like a shot.”

Father-of-five Davidson estimates his divorces have cost him more than £60 million. He hit the skids in the noughties declaring himself bankrupt in 2006, but says being investigated as part of Operation Yewtree in 2013 was “the darkest period in my life”. All of the allegations against him were dropped but the 18-month investigation cost him £1million in lost work. Winning 2014’s Celebrity Big Brother was the sunshine after the storm. “It made me feel that most of the public were on my side.”

Davidson strongly denies historic charges of racism levelled at his old character Chalky White. “I invented Chalky to make people laugh, not to cause hatred. I wanted people to love him. I based him on Georgie Campbell who I went to school with in Kidbrooke. TV was full of funny accents in the 70s and 80s. It wasn’t deemed offensive; it was part of mainstream comedy.”

The breadth of Jim’s comedic prowess – encompassing gag-telling, physical comedy, impressions, anecdotes, and songs – is generally overlooked by his detractors. In his varied career, he has also been an actor, playwright, panto star and businessman. He launched Ustreme during Covid. As well as showing old stand-up videos, it launched Laughter Class to find and tutor new joke-telling comedians, and showcased Donald Trump impersonator, Mike Osman. “At least Trump’s getting things done,” says Jim. “I can’t remember Joe Biden doing anything.”

Davidson met Natasha at Southampton’s International Boat Show 18 months ago. “She’s a good South London girl and she don’t take no ***t at all,” he says approvingly. “I have to watch what I say around her.”

Jim’s family describe him as kind and generous, but also driven and unpredictable. “I change on a sixpence,” he admits. “I’ve just got so much on my mind. I am my only income and I tend to worry too much about things.”

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As usual he’s full of plans. “I’ve got a new website coming, JDVIP, which will have behind-the-scenes footage – Jim at home, Jim backstage. It’s gonna be great.”

He would love Ustreme to re-show more old comedies, free of trigger warnings. “Debbie Arnold and my Natasha had former RAF Chinook pilot Liz McConaghy go on Girl Talk. The interview was quite harrowing, so at the end of it we ran the Samaritans line. That’s the nearest we came to a trigger warning. You don’t need a trigger warning on Jimmy Jones, you know how it’s going to be from the first joke.”

TV twisting reality to suit their agenda annoys him too. “SAS Rogue Heroes – what a disappointment. Paddy Mayne was nothing like that. Paddy was 6ft 4, not 5ft 8; he never swore and he had a proper County Down accent. You can tell it was a Peaky Blinders production. On Peaky Blinders, you had15 different Birmingham accents in one family.”

He will do another series of cooking show, Jim’s Kitchen “when I get a kitchen again…I’d like to do a live Saturday night variety show too, I’ve got an idea for a sitcom but it all costs. What do I want that’s achievable? “I want to get Benny Hill and the brilliant Hale & Pace sketch-shows on Ustreme next. That’s what I want. And I still want to cut a deal to show my BBC shows.”

• For more about Ustreme and Jim Davidson tour dates see Ustreme.com