Comedian has admitted that he and his wife, Melanie, almost parted ways. But a "terrible" joke appeared to save their marriage.

The 58-year-old star has been married since 1993 and the couple share three sons together - Joe, Luke and Daniel. However, it hasn't always been plain sailing for the family. The comedian sat down with Elizabeth from the podcast as he openly admitted: "We were at the decree NISI stage of the divorce."

He went on to explain that he and his wife had split up and were apart for around 20 months, when she attended a where he was doing stand up comedy.

"At the time I used to tell this terrible joke about saying, I'm really sad at the moment I split up my wife and going oh, it's not that bad, we're not divorced or anything, I've just killed her but I've kept her head in the fridge," John shared.

"Terrible joke and not something I would say now and certainly not something I would say after that night because I looked to the left and the head that was meant to be in the fridge was in the audience." He added: "I tell you where we were at. We were at the decree NISI stage of the divorce."

John explained what had gone wrong in the marriage explaining: "We were just haggling over money and kids and stuff like that. I remember seeing the head thinking, oh my God, that joke's going to cost me another 20 grand."

Sharing how they eventually reconciled, the comedian added: "Then we ended up going to counselling because she wouldn't sign the papers and we couldn't finalise the deal. So we went to counselling, not to get back together or to see what was wrong, [it was] to try and sort out the final details about lawyers.

"I remember sitting in the room and she was talking for 20 minutes and I was talking for 20 minutes, and it was going a little bit backwards and forward, and this counsellor went what are you two doing here? Why don't you just go for the coffee? I can see what you probably can't see. Just go and have a coffee. And then that was it."