Whose Line Is It Anyway? - probably the best known of all improv shows - returns to the stage this December for three special festive performances to celebrate 30 years of the format. We caught up with Clive Anderson, who has hosted the comedy since its inception, to find out more:

Hi Clive. How are you? We read in the papers your house burnt down recently?

There was bit of an exaggeration in the headline! It was burned considerably, but it didn't burn down. It is damaged, and we are out of it for a few months now while it's restored.

It's just, on a low level, a bit irritating to be away from your stuff and having to take decisions about 'when do we start this?' and what work's done, and all that. It would've been more dramatic and damaging if the whole house had burnt down and also easier to start again, but we're in a mixture of cleaning things, repairing the bits that were burnt, and repainting. All of our stuff that wasn't destroyed is covered in soot.

Goodness. Well, wishing you all the best with that! Moving on to comedy... Whose Line Is It Anyway? is thirty years old!

As you get older, time seems to zoom by rather rapidly. 30 years make it sound very elderly, but it feels about five or six years ago that it started - but I'm sure the record books are correct.

The format has endured well.

We did a radio series first, then it was on telly in this country for I think 10 years. Creators Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson took it to America, and it carries on there. So there must be something going for it.

It was less than a year between the Radio 4 series and it starting on Channel 4...

Yeah, it was a bit of a whirlwind in that sense. We did it, and then immediately started to say "this should be on television". I'm not sure I was generally in that mindset myself - I was thinking "Oh, let's leave it for a bit, let's do it on radio for a few years..." so if everyone had listened to me, we'd probably be doing the 30th year of the radio series and would've missed the chance to go on television!

Bizarrely, the relevant people at BBC Television couldn't quite work out how you could do improvisation on television compared to radio. They swithered, is the Scots word for it. Ages later, they came back with an offer to do a pilot, but by then we had already signed to do a whole 13 episode series with Channel 4, which I thought was a bit more young and thrusting a channel at the time.

Swithered is a great word. You must have used lots of good words in your days as a barrister. Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you had stuck at that profession? You could be head judge now, or whatever it is called...

Oh yes, I could definitely be a Chief Justice by now, I've really deprived the legal world! Ha ha.

I liked having a sort of one arm in comedy and one leg in the law, whichever limbs you allocate to each of them. I liked that period of my life, which was for a few years.

At first we recorded at the weekends so I could fit in both things, but once I started doing my chat show, it took up too much time. So I had to start taking chunks of time off, and then things went quite well for me in television and I did documentaries and all sorts of things, and I kind of went with the flow.

I think I always had it in mind that I was going to eventually return to being a lawyer, but that didn't happen. So I've deprived the world of my law services and everyone has had to put up with me as a TV and radio presenter instead!

So in the early days of Whose Line, you were still doing that day job during the week?

Yes. I'd been doing a bit of comedy for a long while [Clive was President of Cambridge Footlights when at university] but I was still practising law for several series.

We used to record something like Monday and Friday evenings, and two shows on a Saturday, two shows on a Sunday, something like that. Not huge recordings of dozens of shows like some quiz shows can do, but with about 3 weekends we could get the bulk of a series done. As long as I juggled my time decently, I could carry on being in court during the week.

Wow! Did anyone recognise you from the TV? That might have undermined your status in court?

I used to worry about that. It happened surprisingly little. I did an appearance on a kind of obscure programme once, and the next day I was in the courtroom and a police officer said, "Oh, I saw you on television last night." I assume he went far in the police force for being able to identify someone out of context, because you wouldn't expect to see somebody who is appearing on a telly programme the next day in a courtroom in a work role.

In court you wear a wig and gown, so you don't look quite as recognisable, but it worried me - probably unnecessarily - that the jury will go out and they'll come back after three hours and, when asked "have you decided?", they'd reply "Seven of us say he is the bloke off the telly and five of us say not!"

We're obviously chatting now because we've got some live shows coming up - at the Royal Albert Hall.

It's good fun doing these live shows. When we first thought about doing live shows we wondered "Is this going to work?" because it is different to television. You know, the fans, if they're used to seeing it on TV where everything is very fast paced... you've got to try to keep that pace up.

It turns out we can, or the improvisers can. So we've done it in Edinburgh, we've done the Palladium in London, and another theatre, the Adelphi, as well. So I think we're confident we can do the live show. Of course, the Albert Hall is an extra challenge, because it's a very big venue, and it's not the same shape as a regular theatre. But we'll see how it goes!

Are you looking forward to reuniting with the likes of Josie Lawrence and Colin Mochrie?

Oh yes, they're all good fun in different ways. Josie is always so impressive in these theatrical things because, as you've probably seen, she's got a spectacularly good singing voice... which she can unite with improvising stuff, and coming up with jokes... Even if what she's singing wasn't funny, it's like hearing somebody sing in a musical. So she's very good.

Colin is fantastic. The crowd loves Colin!

And we've got some other guys too [including Mike McShane, who joined the line-up after this interview was conducted]. I'm not sure what combination we're using them in, but they're great performers as well. There will be some people who follow the American series now, so you'll probably recognise some faces from the American shows.

Do you have any favourite games, ones you look forward to calling out?

We quite often end on something like making up a musical about somebody's life or something quite substantial. I would say sometimes that those don't work as well as they might, but when they do work, they are fantastic because when the raw material is somebody's life, it's 4, or it might be 5 or so people all working off each other, trying to work out how to get laughs out of his job in computers, for example. Maybe I'm just being "Wow, we got through it", but I certainly like those ones!

There's a very silly game called "Stand, Sit, Bend", or it can be "Stand, Sit, Bend, Lie Down" - all they have to do is keep going in new positions. One person has to be standing, somebody has to be sitting down... That always makes me laugh. It's not the cleverest in the sense of word play, and they're not singing, and the acting is fairly rudimentary, it's just the absurdity of that game, I like a lot.

Do you ever wish you could join the others in some of these games?

Not really. Very occasionally I'd be dragged into the action, I'm happy enough to do that.

In the American ones, Drew Carey, when he presented it, used to join in an improv session at the end of every episode. And I don't know whether I would have added much. Also, there's sort of an air of authority I have - "You've got to do this now" or "You've got to stop now" - and if I was to join in, and not do particularly well, maybe my authority would be undermined?

What you are looking for from audience suggestions?

Usually you say, especially in a bigger venue, "Shout out something" and loads of people shout out, so it's hard to pick out any given one. I've almost got so many options that I could pick one that's easiest and we'd like to do, but it's quite nice to get different challenging suggestions.

The same kind of things do keep coming up. For example, if you're looking for a style of film people will quite often shout out "Film Noir" or "Porn Movie". They've been around for quite some time, so I don't mind sorting them in to the mix, but it would be good to have something of the moment.

So the question we've been leading up to... the Whose Line Is It Anyway? format continues to prove its popularity on TV, for example there's a new version coming to the Middle East. Why is it not back on UK television yet?

I don't really know. When Dan and Mark went off to America to make it there, I think at that point, everyone who commissioned the show at Channel 4 had moved on. Nobody said "that's my baby, I've got to keep it going...", so they said "well, thank you very much" instead. It didn't strike me as a dreadful thing at the time, because I was doing my chat show.

In a way, it's quite good to do something and people look back at it saying "Oh, I wish there were more", rather than "For goodness sake, is he still churning that out?" Maybe we get the benefit of the fact that there's a sort of nostalgia, but if they were on year after year...

But, you know, I don't think I'd be turning it down if the show was recommissioned. But I can't give you any exclusive; I have no indication that anyone is even thinking about that.

Maybe it could go to a different channel now; maybe it should go back to the BBC?! The producers could say, "Look, you missed out all those years ago. Now you've had enough time to think about it... You've seen 3 different versions of it, so now is the time for the BBC to recommission it..."

Dave seems like it could be a good home for new episodes. So, now we have it on record that you'd be up for it, let's start getting the channels on board!

Let's make it your suggestion...

10% of all commissions for us then?

Sorry, I can't quite hear what you're saying now.