Never too late to find your inner joker at the International Clown Festival

Bilbo first emerged about 10 years ago, when Mr Richards helped organise the carnival at his home town in Cheshire. "I got dressed up as a clown and this bloke offered me a job doing children's parties. I've never looked back. We do schools, residential homes, parties. I can't think of a better job than making people laugh, can you?"

"We" means The Diablos, the troupe he belongs to with Georgina Hargreaves, aka Gino, a former children's book illustrator and writer. She discovered her inner clown in a class in circus skills at the age of 50, taken to help cope with the break-up of her marriage. Now, 10 years later, she performs wearing a white bubble wig topped with a massive bow and a multi-coloured dress barely covering oversized pantaloons. "I always enjoyed dressing up as a kid, but it wasn't until I became a clown I could be myself. It was like starting a new life.''

Yesterday, the Diablos were among more than 100 clowns from all over the world attending the week-long International Clown Festival amid the faded grandeur of the Winter Gardens at Weston-Super-Mare, a curiously appropriate location. Here clowns were conducting classes for fellow clowns and the public in such essentials as make-up, magic and circus skills while also performing for schoolchildren and in hospitals.

This was also the place to buy multi-coloured oversized boots, juggling balls, magic equipment and other clowning accessories.

Discovering your inner clown late in life was a common theme. "One day, this clown just popped out of me," said Shobhana Schwebke, aka Shobi-Dobi, 68, over from California for the event. A former painter and dancer, she believes clowning to be a "spiritual path" and now works in hospitals and runs clown workshops. "Being a clown lightens my life. Some days I don't have a clown job but I still get dressed up to go shopping."

David Vaughan, aka Conk, a former factory worker from Birmingham, also discovered clowning as a cure for depression after divorce.

"There's so much trouble in the world today, we are needed to brighten things up and put the smile back on people's faces."

Such converts ensure continuity of a tradition whose origins are lost in time but which carried with it an adherence to a strict code of ethics and respect for its customs. Clowning evolved from the court jesters of ancient times, while medieval travelling players always included clown-type characters. The theatre of the Commedia del Arte, which began in Italy in the 16th century and contained a cast of stock comic characters, including the Harlequin, led to the English pantomime tradition. Clown and fool characters also play an important part in Shakespeare.

Joseph Grimaldi is considered to be the father of modern clowning. Born in London in 1778, about the time circus clowning became popular in Europe, he performed in theatre pantomimes and is credited with giving a starring role to the Whiteface clown - one of the three modern-day clown types - originally a minor part of the Commedia del Arte cast but who overtook the Harlequin in popularity.

The Whiteface is top of the pecking order of clowns. The two other types are the Auguste, a term thought to date from 19th-century Germany and who usually wears the most exaggerated make-up, and the Happy Hobo or Sad Tramp clown, the most famous exponent of which was, of course, Charlie Chaplin.

But in these days of post-modern irony and slick American comedies, is there still a place for corny slapstick? For flowers that squirt water and three-foot-long shoes?

"Look around you," said clown Bluey - "no one calls me anything else" - one of the organisers, waving at a veritable forest of coloured wigs, oversized check suits and red noses. "Clowning isn't dying at all, it's evolving. And as long as people want to laugh, we are going to be around."

Certainly there seems no shortage of young recruits to the tradition. Eight-year-old Martin Powderill and his brother Caleb, 13, are, respectively Little Flip and Little Flop alongside their father, Jo, aka Flop Top, and older brother, Sam, 19, Flip Top. Mr Powderill, 40, became a clown while doing Christian charity work in eastern Europe. "Sometimes our clowning is part of our Christian work, sometimes it isn't. We're the official clowns at Newbury and Leicester racecourses."

But perhaps the last word should go to Georgina Hurdsfield, eight, aka Pick a Lily, from Runcorn, who performs with her mother, Susan, otherwise known as Pop Up Polly, and 12-year-old brother, Thomas, Pickle. Resplendent in pigtail, tiny yellow hat, spotted dress and matching pantaloons, with a sparkling pink nose, when asked if she wanted to be a clown when she got older, she replied firmly and entirely seriously: "I'm a clown now."