It’s the stuff of showbusiness legend now that a Glasgow audience can be the toughest crowd in the country. The story of Des O’Connor pretending to faint rather than carry on in front of a hostile gathering is oft quoted as definitive proof. He may be the tallest man in comedy but even Greg Davies has been known to wilt in the face of a Glasgow welcome.

‘I’ve played loads of gigs there since but that particular night was awful,’ he recalls with a shudder. ‘They just hated me and I as was MC of the gig, I couldn’t just go back to my hotel, I had to keep coming on. Someone at the back called me a “six foot eight tower of piss”. I didn’t think it was possible to have a tower of piss; there would have to be a supporting structure or maybe it would have to be frozen piss.’

The man who is best known as one third of sketch troupe We Are Klang or as cruel teacher Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners (a 13-year career in the actual teaching profession clearly came in handy as research) is following up his Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated solo debut Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog with a show about his ‘irritation with the undeniable fact that I am now an adult’.

Not only is this sequel called The Back of My Mum’s Head, the poster features a real-life picture of the back of Greg’s mum’s head. ‘It’s a recreation of a picture I took standing next to my mum on a beach. It made me laugh because her head looked like a massive microphone. I tried to use it as my poster but I was told that the quality wasn’t good enough so I had to recreate it. I could have used any old lady’s head but that seemed a fraud so I drove to the Midlands with a photographer and we climbed a local beauty spot and took that. But my mum’s furious because she hadn’t had her hair done.’

Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Mon 29 Oct.

Greg Davies - Live At The Apollo