Comedian Jo Caulfield has had to reappraise a few aspects of her life after finding out her marriage has been illegal for a decade. A familiar face on Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You and the Apprentice: You’re Fired, she spoke to Chris Price.

How is the tour going?

I’d forgotten how much I enjoy travelling about. It’s so varied considering we are such a small country.

Is there anywhere you look forward to going to on tour?

I’m always keen on going to places I have never been. It’s quite fun to find interesting things to talk about on the night.

What inspired the new tour Better the Devil You Know?

Well it is not a Kylie Minogue tribute. I wish I hadn’t called it that now. My partner and I thought we had been married for 10 years but because we got married in New York we found out that it is not a legal marriage because there is loads of paperwork which we haven’t done. So that led to a lot of husband and relationship material because if you suddenly find out you are single, you think it is a good time to appraise the relationship and study whether you want to keep him or move on.

So did you have a few wild nights with your new found singledom?

I have quite a lot of wild nights anyway but we are both quite lazy and it is quite energetic to become single again. I could not be bothered with dating. We are both too lazy to leave each other or get properly married.

So how did you manage to go 10 years before you realised you weren’t married?

Well I talked about it on stage. I said we went to New York to avoid the whole family wedding expense because I thought ‘I don’t want to buy everybody dinner’ and you cannot ever have a small wedding. You invite one person and it ends up being 100 people. So I was talking to this woman who had done it as well and then she started talking about all this paperwork and I didn’t know what she was talking about.

When did you know you wanted to do stand-up?

I just knew I wanted to do something funny and I enjoyed making people laugh. I remember when I went to a club, I saw somebody doing it and it seemed very achievable because it was just an ordinary person like me. Then I found out you just had to phone a club and ask to do five minutes for nothing. The route into it seemed easy. There were no exams or nepotism involved. It seemed doable. You just went from gig to gig and tried to get better. Now it is different. New comics watch so much on TV that they start fully formed. They are thinking it is a career and I don’t think a lot of people went into it as a career. They just wanted to do it.

Do you know Canterbury well?

I have been there for a show before and I remember it was just when everybody was starting to get sat navs and I had a routine about them. So I asked the audience who had one and nobody put their hand up. I said ‘what do you do when you want to go somewhere you haven’t been before?’ and they all said ‘we don’t’. It was really weird. I thought ‘what do you mean you don’t go anywhere?’ So then I thought they must really like Canterbury.

What about Kent as a whole?

I have friends who live in the Kent and Sussex border area, which I think is really beautiful. Also, I went out with a guy from Lydd on Romney Marsh and I remember going down there to stay with his dad and just thinking ‘what a strange area’. It seems ripe for smuggling and all sorts to go on. It is right out on its own. It’s very suspicious that there is an airport there. Who is it handy for? And Romney Marsh is very atmospheric and Dickensian. It has got a lot going for it.

Jo Caulfield appears at Canterbury’s Gulbenkian Theatre on Saturday, October 13 as part of the Canterbury Festival. Tickets £14. Call 01227 769075.