Peter Kay was moved to tears on the opening night of his first live comedy tour in 12 years.
The comedian received a standing ovation that lasted several minutes, with the audience chanting his name, as he took the stage on Friday.
He seemed overwhelmed by the reaction, pausing to lean on a stool on stage before standing up and rubbing his eyes.
“Oh Jesus look at me, I mean, what’s this all about? … how am I supposed to do comedy now?” he asked the audience, eliciting the first laughs of the evening.
She reportedly added: “Beautiful Manchester, you made me cry… where did all this emotion come from?”
The two-hour show included Kay’s famous garlic bread routine, which got an Italian makeover, and jokes about modern technology (“What did we do before Amazon? Catalogs!”).
The live tour marks Kay’s return to standup comedy after being largely absent from the public eye for the past four years.
Friday’s show at the Manchester AO Arena is the first of a mammoth tour from December to August 2023.
It is due to visit the likes of Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Belfast, Newcastle, Glasgow and Dublin, with the run ending on 11 August 2023 at the Sheffield Utilita Arena.
Following the announcement, Kay’s official website appeared to crash briefly with the surge in online traffic.
The live tour is the comedian’s first since 2010, when he held the Guinness World Record for the best-selling show of all time, with more than 1.2 million people.
Kay, from Bolton, has been largely out of the spotlight in recent years.
He returned to the stage in August 2021 for two special charity events to raise money for Laura Nuttall, a 20-year-old with an aggressive type of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme.
There was also a brief return in January 2021 when he appeared on BBC Radio 2 to chat to Cat Deeley, who was filling in after Graham Norton left the station, about his love of music, mixtapes and the musical Mamma Mia!
He also made a surprise appearance at a charity screening of his Car Share series in 2018.
Kay canceled her last tour in December 2017, citing “unforeseen family circumstances”.
Over the past few years, Kay has delighted fans with her hit TV series Car Share and her Bafta-winning standup routines.