My hilarious pet pig Wilbur is more popular than I am — so I'll let him bring home the bacon

I started putting clips of his antics online. They got a lot more interest than my comedy

Wilbur, the pig who thinks he's a dog (Dom Joly) (Dom Joly)

I think I’m going to take early retirement soon. It’s not that I’m bored of showbusiness or have made enough money to buy a beach house in Malibu …. No, it’s just that my pig appears to be a lot more popular than I am, and sometimes you’ve got to take the hint. Wilbur is the pig. We rescued him from a sad life in a flat in Cheltenham where he was not enormously happy. Now he is enormous and happy on our farm. We were told he was a kunekune, but the vet now thinks he is at least three-quarters wild boar.

To be honest, Wilbur rather runs the place now and we just do our best to keep him happy. On hot days we provide muddy pools for him to roll around in. On cold days he comes inside and lies beside the Aga and becomes the world’s slowest cooking pork roast.

Wilbur is very communicative and constantly grunts and snorts about whatever he happens to be unhappy about at that particular moment. I started filming his antics and putting the clips up online. They were quite the hit. In fact, they got a lot more interest than any of my comedy clips. I posted a clip of Wilbur trying to join my three dogs on a walk. He ran up to them in a “what are we four handsome dogs going to do now?” sort of way. My three dogs looked at the pig in disgust but Wilbur would not take no for an answer, and tried to run up the hill with them until he was persuaded to return home in exchange for food.

I checked my Facebook page the following morning to find that this clip had clocked up more views than anything else I had ever posted online. This included clips of shows I’d made. Shows I’d written, honed and crafted over endless hours in edit suites. Nobody cared. They just wanted to see the pig that thought he was a dog.

This was a bit depressing. It was a bit like the fact that, however successful you have been in the past 15 years, however much money you have earned, if you had just bought a flat in central London and then watched telly for 15 years you would probably be worth more than any of us…

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I posted another clip of Wilbur having a shower on a hot day. Wilbur stared into the lens with bliss written all over his little eyes. He is a pro and knows what the viewing public wants. The clip count went mental again. People couldn’t get enough of my sweet little pig.

That’s when I made the decision. I am retiring from showbusiness in order to spend more time managing Wilbur’s career. I have already booked several warm-up gigs for him. He is to appear on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch to discuss with Tim Lovejoy how mud is actually the most effective sunscreen known to man (or pig). I have then arranged for him to appear in the Big Brother House for a couple of days. He is going in as a real contestant, but I’m worried that they might suss him out as he is a bit too bright for that crowd. I smell Baftas.