You’re kick starting the spring tour off on 16th February in Leicester. Are you looking forward to it?

Definitely! I’m on my fifth tour now and it’ll be a great start to the spring dates. This time round I’ve split the tour into three parts and I prefer it this way as you can keep the material fresh rather than using the same gags all the time. Also on the last tour I had over 100 dates and it sort of ruined me a bit.

Are there any topics that you’ve been told by your family and friends that are strictly out of bounds on tour?

I’ve got free reign. I’m not a very confrontational comedian, I’m not overly risky. Sometimes I’ll think of a line or situation and I think for comedy to work it needs to become personal. I don’t know why it becomes funnier if it’s my wife that it’s happening to in the joke, it just does. It’s one of the rules of comedy. It’s like with the wife, people will come up to her after the gig and say to her “Fancy him doing that,” and she’ll just go “Well he is a comedian”.

On this tour you talk about all sorts of things from the worst chat up lines, the birds and the bees to the world’s worst school trip?

The world’s worst school trip sort of springs from a little comedy skit I do based on a Pink Floyd song and the line is ‘We don’t need no education,’ and my response to that is well I think you do actually – that’s a double negative! And then that’s my tenuous link into schools. All that actually comes from this leaflet that came into work once and it read ‘Why not visit Greens Secret Nuclear Bunker’ and its like ‘Fun for all the family come and see the weapons of mass destruction.’ It just reminded me of one of those shit school trips you used to get and for some reason my class always got the shit trips. I was in the A stream and I’d be thinking I’ve worked hard all year, I’m doing Latin, I’m doing all sorts of stuff and then you’ve got all the thickos going to Blackpool. That’s not fair! And every year it was just somewhere shit.

I hate to admit that as a teacher I once took the children on a trip to the local sewage works.

That is shit, no pun intended. Can I ask you a question then, pencils as prizes? Pencils! What’s that all about? Here you go, you’ve done really well, have a pencil, where’s my trip to Blackpool?

I have no justifiable answer it is pretty lame... As well as the tour you’ve just finished writing a new sitcom with Neil Fitzmaurice?

Yeah that’s going great. It’s coming along. It used to be that you’d write something and you’d get the go ahead straight away to make it, now you write something and it gets notes made on it, then it goes to the next level up and now we’re at the stage where it’s gone to one of the heads at the BBC and if they like it it’ll go to a table read. So we’re about halfway up the process at the moment.

You’ve also just written and directed a new short film called Buzz Dish?

Yeah that’s shown a lot of potential. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. It won an award. It’s about three lads that live in Cumbria and how it’s not so idyllic living there! They come up with an assortment of harebrained schemes to make money.

It sounds like you’re very busy at the moment?

Yeah one of the questions I get asked a lot is what do you do in your spare time? And I always say I don’t really have any. In my spare time I’ll read or just research, or I’m writing. I love the writing process and just getting my ideas on paper. Although funnily enough sometimes you can have a good day writing and come back to it and think, this is all b******s, but you put it in a drawer and maybe two weeks later you’ll come back to it and make sense of it.

Do you get struck by inspiration in the oddest of places?

All the time, I’ll write on whatever I can get my hands on. At home I’ve got a drawer full of things. I’ll just open it up and it’s got bar mats and bits of paper, car park tickets and I’ll read it and it’ll say Madonna marries Rambo and I’ll think what did that mean? Then it’ll come to me five years later!

Maybe you’ll remember in time for the Leicester date and all will become clear.

Maybe!

Thank you for the interview and we’ll see you on the 16 February.

Thanks! See you then.