IF there was still any bad blood between Dom Joly and Swindon, it certainly wasn’t to be found in the packed auditorium of the Arts Centre on Thursday evening.

The Trigger Happy TV star famously made some fleeting remarks about Swindon’s lacklustre architecture (describing the Railway Village as a slum, and the wider town as the Bronx of the Cotswolds) which prompted a media storm – along with a council-guided tour of the town to try and convince him otherwise.

Declaring a ceasefire, he found himself velcroed on to the front of a van and driven along the M4 in a bid to secure £50m Lottery funding for the Science Museum Swindon. This valiant effort, although unsuccessful, certainly went some way to building bridges and bringing in the rapturous applause and laughter from the audience on Thursday when he appeared during the 23rd Swindon Festival of Literature.

And unlike Weston super Mare and Hastings, who have also borne the brunt of his sharp tongue, he doesn’t find himself banned from the town boundaries.

In the hot seat he was grilled by BBC Wiltshire’s Abigail Mobbs where he discussed his early career as a diplomat, his engineered interviews outside Parliament that saw clowns throwing custard pies at each other in the background while a prominent MP gave his take on the politics of the day, and ultimately the success of Trigger Happy TV.

Joly is currently filming a brand new series of the Channel 4 comedy show, which has earned a cult following, but still remembers the first time he realised how big it had become. “Three days after the first episode of Trigger Happy TV aired I was on a train to Oxford when a phone went off in the carriage. Three people all yelled “hello?” It was really odd, the whole thing,” he said, revealing his shock at learning the show was going out between Friday night hit shows Friends and Frasier. “Sometimes I wish I had enjoyed it more at the time, because it was absolute madness.”

He arrived at the festival having been in Brighton on Wednesday filming for the new series, and has not long returned to the family home in the Cotswold’s having filmed The Island with “Barely There” Grills which saw him lose three stone in a fortnight.

His famed young education at a Quaker school with Osama Bin Laden (Joly was six when Bin Laden would have been 16 – and he is still eagerly hunting for that school photo) along with his confession that he had been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter eight years ago were particular highlights of the evening.

As was the revelation that a letter from GQ magazine hangs in his downstairs toilet, banning him from ever attending the magazine’s Man of the Year awards again after unfortunate incidents with Elton John and Jonny Wilkinson.

And while Joly admitted he loved his TV work, he revealed his true passion as writing, which has led to the publication of a number of books. “I think it should be illegal to write an autobiography until you’re 60,” he told the festival. “Bloomsbury approached me and I said, no it’s not for me – then I saw the advance.

“I thought I would write a spoof autobiography, but I didn’t tell anyone. In my mind it was very clear that it was a spoof because there was a talking dog in it.”

But readers loved it and his latest work – Here Comes The Clown, A Stumble Through Show Business – brings things right up to date with what he describes as the last 15 years of making “spectacular mistakes” and “getting into trouble”.