‘I don’t think I’m the hot new thing in comedy anymore.’ Dara Ó Briain is being both terribly humble and pretty realistic. A fixture on stages and screens for more decades than he may care to admit, his love of performing in front of a live crowd is unquenchable (and let’s face it, audiences have been reciprocating for all those years). 

‘I just keep coming back to stand-up. It turns out that this is what I do because this is what I love. That said, at some point, the temptation may be to burn it all down and do something risky, like a totally improvised character show or silent clowning. Take 25 years of goodwill with the audience I’ve built up and dynamite it with an hour and a half of me miming being trapped in a box. That could be my new direction now . . . ’

It's fairly certain that this is not where Ó Briain’s career is headed. He is, however, taking a slight diversion in his new show by replacing a chunk of the more nonsensical and definitely partly improvised material for something a little bit more personal.

‘I’ve never told this story before outside of the third bottle of wine at a dinner party,’ he notes of a long routine which centres on a very personal revelation. ‘The story is full of revelations. You’ll be reeling from surprise after surprise, each one more surprising than the last. After one show recently, someone said to me, “that’s a lot more personal than you’ve done in the past”. Well, I haven’t got any other stories because nothing has happened; I’d love to tell you funny stories from the road, but I’ve just been sitting at home for the last two years.’

Dara Ó Briain, The Big Top, North Berwick, on Thursday 10 August and the Corn Exchange, Bedford, on Thursday 31 August.