Jasper Carrott has admitted that he is grateful for the opportunity to show his "personable" side on Golden Balls.

The stand-up comic admitted that the ITV1 game show, which first aired in June 2007, has worked wonders for his profile.

"We do two [episodes] a day and take up to four hours to record each. I spend 20 minutes in each contestant's dressing room getting to know them," Carrott told the Daily Mail. "This is the personable side of me the public has never seen."

Jasper said that he was attracted to the format of the show when he was offered the host job by Endemol Productions. He had previously owned shares in Celador, but refused to front a number of their programmes.

"I turned down Millionaire," he revealed. "I couldn't have done it as well as Chris Tarrant, or at least I couldn't have done it any better.

"I just felt that Golden Balls was the right thing to do. I didn't care if people thought I was a failure. This is TV, not Iraq. When I met [American satirist] Mort Sahl, he said that once you become predictable, you're lost."