Amazingly the 46-year-old comic had never read the great man until last year when he spend the whole of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival reading from Dickens' work at the Assembly Rooms.
He enjoyed the experience so much he agreed to do a repeat performance as part of the Hebden Bridge Arts Festival which runs until this Sunday.
Half his audience were obviously literary lovers, while the rest (me included) had gone along out of curiosity.
Phill, who you would never guess had a cultural side if you watched him on TV's Never Mind the Buzzcocks and It's Only TV But I Like It, reckons Dickens is a genius and he could "drown in the great man's poise."
To be fair Phill, who spent five years at Radio 6, is good at reading aloud and his south-eastern English accent went down well with the Hebden Bridge brigade, although watching someone reading on stage, when there is little else going on, does take a bit of getting used to.
My mind did wander during his first reading from The Uncommercial Traveller, which didn't have enough humour in it.
His second from Pickwick Papers was much better. He threw himself into all the different characters and his obvious enthusiasm for Dickens was catching.
What Phill loves about Dickens is his attention to minutiae and the fact that he was observing the world around him, a bit like Phill himself does now, only in an entirely different way.
I admire his bravery in tackling Dickens, because he never knows how his audience is going to react.
But I don't see it having mass appeal. In fact I'm not sure it was all about Phill discovering Dickens. More Phill discovering himself.
Either way Phill didn't disappoint. He told us he had spent four hours before the show at the pub and you knew without a doubt where he was heading after his performance. Dickens or beer?– a close call.
Diane Crabtree