IF Bernard Manning had been a lawyer, he'd have been the Public Offender. Yet the man who has spent most of his showbiz life shocking people sounds shocked himself - shocked and sad.

"Have you heard about what happened to those poor kids in that disco in Sweden?" he asks softly. "It's a tragedy, a real tragedy."

This is not the sort of warm and concerned attitude you might expect from Bernard Manning. If people think of him at all, they tend to picture him as some sort of fat, foul-mouthed, coarse, sexist, racist monster, spewing four-letter abuse dressed down as comedy.

True, there's no denying that Bernard is a big bloke. But anyone who goes along to one of his live performances and is surprised when he starts effing and blinding and putting the boot into every nationality on earth must be naive beyond belief - the sort of dim innocent who would buy a video with a title like Nympho Babes in Lust and then be shocked to discover it was a porn movie.

No, with Bernard, what you see is what you get - usually straight between the eyes, with both barrels blazing.

On stage, he sounds like a man who rubs his tonsils regularly with sandpaper, gargles with broken glass and smokes 100 fags a day. Yet when he started in the business almost 50 years ago, it was as a gentle-voiced crooner with the Oscar Rabin Dance Band.

"Happy days, they were, son," he recalls. "I've made five albums for Decca and they all sold very well. I never hear them now, of course, but they did well and I still do a bit of singing."

He took the singing gig as far as it would go and then went back to earning his living as a greengrocer. But the urge to make people laugh is a powerful one and led Manning to perform in clubs part-time. Now, at 68, he's played everywhere from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to Strangeways Prison in his native Manchester. Tomorrow, for one night only, he's at Oxford's Apollo Theatre.

He doesn't do it for the money, either. He's been a millionaire for longer than he can remember, his bank account boosted by the shrewd sales of videos of him in performance, with titles that say it all: Shooting from the Lip, Ungagged, Bernard Bites Back and, perhaps most subtle of all, Banging with Manning.

He does it to hear the laughter. There are, of course, plenty who point the politically correct finger at Manning and accuse him of - among other things - racism and sexism. He sighs deeply. "Racist? That's nonsense," he says wearily. "I don't single one group out, they all get it. But it's the image, son. I wrote my autobiography and the shops won't stock it. They've got books about Hitler and Stalin on their shelves, but they won't stock Bernard Manning, oh no.

"It's an uphill battle all the way, but at least people who come to see me know that they'll get a show that's fresh and up to date.

"There are certain gags I won't do - I don't do sick jokes, for instance. But everyone and everything else is a fair target. If people are thinking that they want a good night out, there's only one comedian who comes to mind - myself."

You don't think much of your fellow comics, do you, Bernard?

"No, not really. They don't work at it enough. They're out on the golf course all the time and you don't learn your craft there, you learn it on stage. I've played everywhere - the Palladium, Royal Command Performance, you name it. I was in Belfast last week and I tore the b****** off them." For 36 years, he was married to Veronica, mother of the son he fondly refers to as "young Bernard". When his beloved Veronica died, Bernard shared his home with his mother, Mary Ellen, who lived long enough to see her famous son being given the big red This is Your Life book - an accolade that made her day.

You get the impression that this was more important to Manning than the fact that he'd been recognised for himself.

The real problem some people have with Bernard is that he is what he is and he's not likely to change now.

Some resent him for his coarse humour and some for his wealth. But none can deny that he's worked for what he's got and his money has come from making people happy.

"I still write a few of my gags and nick a few and adapt them," he says. "As Tony Blair said, 'Education, education, education'. Incidentally, if Blair is reincarnated, I hope he comes back as a politician."

This is the joke Bernard told me which I can print.

I thank him for his time and he says: "God bless you, son."

And guess what? This nightmare of the politically correct mob, this hate-figure of the liberal, chattering classes, this Public Offender - he sounds as if he actually means it.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.