MOST stand-up comedians would be dismayed to be told they looked like a middle-aged geography teacher. But where Jeremy Hardy is concerned, the description, made by a sympathetic reviewer last month, is particularly apt.

For as one slightly less friendly critic noted, this left-wing comedian “repeatedly returns to the subject of schools like a dog scratching a troublesome itch”.

Probably more than any other member of his breed, Mr Hardy uses education as a vehicle for comedy. On stage at London’s Cochrane Theatre this spring, he tackled teachers’ strikes (they should have more of them), the private finance initiative (should be abolished), and testing (an obscenity).

So what is it with Jeremy Hardy? What makes this regular of Radio 4‘s News Quiz continue to bang on about schools and teachers long after his contemporaries have grown up and moved on from the subject? As he says himself, most comedians only talk about education when they have just come out of it: “You can age comedians by what they talk about - when they’re under 30 they talk about how great their teachers were, but once they’re over 30 they tend to stop.”

Mr Hardy has his reasons, though, not least the constant presence of education in his own south London house. His wife, Kit Hollerbach - a former comedienne - trained as a teacher six years ago, first teaching in a primary school and now teaching special needs in a secondary. His daughter has just started secondary school.

He has lived with the “Blairising” of Lambeth’s formerly “loony” Labour council, the sale of many schools for loft apartments, the closure of primaries and special schools, and all have provided him with material, both for his stage shows and for his column in the Guardian newspaper, which was axed last year.

In person he is smaller than you expect, and though in the collective mind’s eye of Radio 4 listeners he wears a cardigan, he is actually clad in jeans and a bright red t-shirt. He throws out radical views on almost any subject, but in a rather low-key, almost deadpan style.

His own educational experience was a very conventional and quite happy one, he says, though he was one of only about three pupils at Farnham grammar school in Surrey whose parents voted Labour. Even then, he did not believe in God or selection.

His dad did ask him if he wanted to sit the scholarship exam for Charterhouse public school, he says, but he told him he did not believe in it. At secondary school he used to graffiti the names of left-wing politicians he had heard of on his exercise books in bubble-writing:

“Chairman Mao, Stalin, Roy Jenkins, Reg Prentice.”

Not much of this cushy, middle-class experience made it into his act, though, till his wife and daughter went to school. Although his family seems to have avoided most of the agonies many London parents experience when choosing schools - his daughter went relatively smoothly from a successful local primary to a well-regarded comprehensive in Wandsworth - educational issues still crowded in.

“My daughter’s primary school was ideal for loft apartments. They took part of it, the old infant section, and converted it. Now they go for a quarter of a million for a one-bedroomed flat. You could just about bear it if they were being occupied by local people on low incomes,” he grumbles.

Although his daughter was not forced to leave her school, other pupils were forced to leave theirs.

Mr Hardy picked over the issue week after week in his Guardian column, much to the irritation of Lambeth council. He also went to protest meetings, and after one skirmish there were claims that a door had been broken down - but he says all that was damaged was a padlock.

Lambeth was trying, perversely, to raise class sizes, he says - in some schools, falling rolls had led to teacher-pupil ratios of around one to 15. But with so many pupils from difficult backgrounds, the schools needed small classes, he argues.

Another of his bugbears is the involvement of private companies in schools - he favours a return to a completely state-run education system, funded through taxation. “Of course companies want to go into schools,” he says. “In some countries they want them in sweat-shops making trainers, but in this country they want kids loyal to the brand as young as possible. They don’t put money into schools because they’re kind, do they?”

And what about religion? Mr Hardy has always been an atheist. “If people become religious as a result of a prison sentence or a nervous breakdown, that’s fine, but it isn’t something that should be indoctrinated into children. If God wants to reveal himself, then let him reveal himself to people who have been through puberty and got their hormones settled down.”

But what is it all for? Is Mr Hardy more interested in changing the world than he is in making people laugh? After all, there was little to joke about in Bethlehem three weeks ago when he joined a march during which three British protesters were shot by Israeli soldiers.

“When you’re 25 you just think if you’re a comedian you might get a girlfriend. But when you’re in your forties you think about your child’s future and you get more serious,” he says. Then he lightens up: “But really, I just shamelessly use whatever platform I get to ram my views down people’s throats.”