Take a lump of Pillsbury dough, add pinches of Alan Bennett and Les Dawson, stir in a little Victoria Wood and you have Britain’s most popular comedian. Peter Kay is Bolton’s finest son and his latest DVD has become the fastest-selling title of the year.

To be a national treasure at 31 implies a meteoric rise, but the blue touch paper was apt to splutter. Once, working in a bingo hall, a caller asked him what he wanted to do with his life and Kay confessed he wasn’t sure. “He looked at me and said, ‘Have you no ambition? Do you not want to be a caller?’ ” The point about Kay is that although he has a satirist’s eye, his stings lack barbs. The Lancastrian’s observations of human absurdities are affectionate. He eschews Ricky Gervais’s comedy of cringe, Johnny Vegas’s drunken vulgarities (Kay is teetotal except for the odd swig of Baileys) and the cruel caricatures of Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and David Walliams.

There’s nowt as funny as folk, he believes: “I love listening to what goes on around me — aunties arriving and people saying, ‘When are you going?’ before they’ve even sat down. Or people saying, ‘Is it hot in here or is it me?’ ” Non-adherents may know Kay from the John Smith advertisements as the beer drinker seen dive-bombing a swimming pool during a diving competition. Earlier this year he stirred up Coronation Street, playing a cameo role as a bungling drayman who made a play for barmaid Shelley Unwin.

But the bedrock of Kay’s fame is his Channel 4 hit comedy series Phoenix Nights, which he wrote, directed and starred in as Brian Potter, the wheelchair-bound owner of a rundown working men’s club in Bolton. In a hapless quest he rallies the mulleted misfits who make up “t’committee” to convince them that the Phoenix can rise again and confound its billing as “the worst club in the north”. It has been flooded, it has burnt down twice and a themed western night ended in a real bar-room brawl.

“Brian’s a likeable character because you can root for him,” Kay explained. “Like Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, he never gives up no matter what life throws at him.”

Phoenix Nights was filmed in a real Bolton club, St Gregory’s, and featured members of Kay’s family and friends. The presence of his mother Deirdre in the cast served a double purpose. He relies on her to vet all his jokes: if she doesn’t laugh, they get cut. It drives his producers mad: “They ask why I show things to her. It’s because she’s the one who will flick off.”

When a jobbing actress failed to turn up, Kay’s wife Susan, then a pharmacist’s assistant in Boots, stepped in. Their best man, a former PE teacher, made his acting debut as the balding young doorman in the first series and proved such a hit that his role was expanded.

Kay also brought in some comics he had met on the stand-up circuit. “Like me, they hadn’t done any acting before this. But acting is bollocks, it’s just confidence,” he said. He did get some real actors in but reckoned “they’re so up their own arses”.

The second series of Phoenix Nights was last year’s fastest-selling DVD. His latest release, of his earlier series That Peter Kay Thing, has notched up 145,000 sales in its first week.

People tell him his humour should be more supercilious and aggressive, but he thinks “clever-dick” shows such as They Think It’s All Over are passé. In a surprising lapse he won The Sun’s opprobrium for his “sick” joke: “What’s black and white and wants feeding? Jill Dando’s cat.”

Then there is the north-south thing. He still lives in Bolton which he considers vital to his success. “I love being at home and being near the people I’ve always known. People think you have to go to London but I’d sooner give up than move there,” he said.

In Bolton he fell in love with Susan. They met nine years ago and were married in 2001. She was his first serious girlfriend: “Falling in love never really happened until Susan came along.” Part of the attraction, perhaps, is that she doesn’t laugh at his jokes. He had been planning the wedding music since he was 14 years old: “When it came to the big day I hardly changed a thing: Xanadu by Olivia Newton-John, Dancing Queen by Abba.”

Unlike many boys he never deserted pop for rock. Which helps to explain his tie-up with Tony Christie, a crooner from south Yorkshire whose 1970s hit Is This the Way to Amarillo was sung hilariously by the bouncers in Phoenix Nights. Christie is to sing the theme tune of Kay’s new series Road to Nowhere, a spin-off beginning on Channel 4 next month that charts a road trip by the club’s clueless bouncers.