Telling stories is the recipe for Hardeep’s success.

It is hard to get a handle on Hardeep Singh Kohli. Many people may know him as the roving reporter suspended and then reinstated by the BBC’s The One Show over misconduct allegations. Others may know him as the comedian-cum-interviewer or radio and television presenter.

Others may know him as a celebrity chef and food writer. He is a man of many hats – well turbans – but he says they are all parts of the whole that go into making Hardeep Singh Kohli: the story–teller.

“I can’t choose between all the things I do as they are all part of me,” explains the 42-year-old Glaswegian. “It is like asking me to pick my favourite vital organ.”

Hardeep is currently utilising a number of his many talents in his show Chat Masala touring the country – comedy, interviewing, cooking and of course story-telling.

He will be opening the Leeds Loves Food Festival with the first slot on the demonstration kitchen on Millennium Square at 11am when he will cook up an Indian treat. In the evening he will be appearing at the Carriageworks in Leeds.

“I love food – you can tell just by looking at my waist-line. The show is just an extension of what I love doing: Getting friends round, having a chat and doing some cooking.

“It comes naturally to me and doesn’t feel like a job,” says Hardeep, who is a divorced father of two teenage children.

For the first time the Leeds Loves Food Festival will include the Yorkshire Post/Yorkshire Evening Post Food and Drink Show which will attract hundreds of food producers and stallholders from Yorkshire and beyond.

“Food festivals are a great way of bringing people together,” says Hardeep.

Last time he was in Leeds was last year when he appeared at the first World Curry festival organised by Yorkshire businessman Zulfi Karim. His love of good food stems back to his childhood.

“Both my parents are exceptionally good cooks. I talk about them a lot in the show and really its name comes from my mum who used to chat to us all the time as she cooked.

“She cooked mainly Indian food, but also bits and pieces of everything. As children we wanted what everyone else was eating. So we got her making pizzas. We didn’t appreciate how lucky we were and how amazing her food was until later.”

Hardeep was born in 1969 in London and moved to Glasgow when he was four. His parents emigrated to England from India in the 1960s and young Haardeep was privately educated by Jesuits in Glasgow.

He loved rugby and his career could have gone in another direction if it hadn’t been for a life-threatening illness when he was at school which ended his dream of becoming the first Sikh professional rugby player.

He was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome.

“It’s sort of like meningitis. I was paralysed from the chest down. That was a life-changing event. I just woke up one morning and could not walk. They did not know what it was. I was playing rugby then. My dream was to be the first Sikh to play for my country. That was ruined, but I made a miracle recovery by all accounts. When I recovered, I felt emboldened, blessed.”

Instead he decided to follow a different path through comedy and show business after first studying for a law degree at Glasgow University.

“My dad used to have loads of videos of some of the best comedians, Morecambe and Wise, Fry and Laurie, and they had huge influence on me and my brothers.”

His younger brother is Sanjeev Kohli, a fellow comedy writer and performer. His elder brother is a policeman.

“I am no stand-up comic,” says Hardeep firmly. “I am a story-teller. I am really surprised that anyone wants to come and see me and I feel terribly blessed that they do.”

But while he likes the fact that people do genuinely seem to like him and some of the trappings that come with his success, he hates the idea of celebrity. “Doctors and nurses who save lives and get paid very little; they are the people that we should celebrate. Not people like me. One of the problems with society today is that celebrity has become all important. We seem to have all our values wrong.”

He seems frustrated and angry with a society that puts fame and fortune above all else. “We have troops dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and yet our front pages are full of Ryan Giggs and Cheryl Cole. When was the last time a soldier’s death made the front pages? Surely a soldier’s life is worth 100 Cheryl Cole stories?

“We have lost our sense of community,” he says.

It is this social conscience which has prompted him to make “serious” programmes and documentaries exploring social identity and other issues.

After graduating from university, he joined the BBC Scotland graduate production trainee scheme.He moved to BBC Television Centre, London to direct children’s TV, and work on Janet Street Porter’s series Reportage. He directed It’ll Never Work, which won awards from the Royal Television Society and BAFTA. He presented In Search of the Tartan Turban, which explored cultural identity as a Briton and a Scot belonging to an ethnic minority. He’s won a children’s BAFTA and also produced a brief Channel 4 daytime schools series, Hardeep Does... that covered a variety of different topical issues. He’s also a regular on BBC political panel programme Question Time, and was an occasional presenter on Newsnight Review, Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4 and Loose Ends.

He says radio is still one of his first loves, although this could well be to do with his ill-fated stint on BBC1’s The One Show. In 2009 Hardeep was suspended from the show after allegations he had acted inappropriately towards a female colleague. Although no formal complaint was ever made, Hardeep made tabloid headlines. He apologised and later returned to the show, but there is still a feeling of resentment.

“I got caught in the cross fire,” he says. “The tabloids were gunning for the show and looking for anything. I wasn’t the real story. No-one ever made a formal complaint against me. There was a lot going on behind the scenes,”

Hardeep says in the long-run the BBC did him a favour as his workload was unsustainable.

But the episode did give him experience of the side of celebrity he would rather have nothing to do with. However, it is a world he knows he has to frequent if he is to do the work he loves. He is a Twitter convert, believing it helps him get his story-telling to a much wider audience. “It means I can communicate with people who just wouldn’t be able to see me or speak to me normally, It is a very powerful tool. There is one woman who Tweets me who suffers from MS and doesn’t get out of her house much.

“I do believe that there is still a sense of community out there we just have to push harder to find it.”

Hardeep Singh Kohli is at the Carriageworks Leeds on July 2 with guest, folk singer Martin Carthy. www.carriageworkstheatre.org.uk.