IT not exactly something to boast about, but it was a gig in Liverpool which put Stewart Lee right off stand-up.

“I had a moment on stage at Rawhide where I thought I’ve got to stop doing this and I gave up from about 2001 to 2004,” he reveals.

“A guy in the audience kept shouting at me “talk about illegal immigrants” and I went, why don’t you then?”

Stewart got the mouthy punter on stage to see what would happen, but security were having none of it and brought his experiment to a swift end.

“So I thought I can’t be bothered,” he says. “It was a number of things, but that was one of them and I stopped gigging for three years.”

Luckily the 41-year-old is firmly back in the stand-up groove and is relishing his latest tour of the UK which comes to the Playhouse next week.

The comedian, writer and director has been plying his trade for two decades, starting as a student at Oxford University where he studied English.

His interest in stand-up was fired by the alternative comedians he saw acting as support acts for bands in the early 1980s.

“In the immediate post punk era a lot of gigs were a lot more cabaret,” he explains.

“Billy Bragg was like that, he used to have a country band on and some Japanese performance artists and a comedian. The first comics that I saw, apart from seeing the Two Ronnies as a kid, were opening for bands.

“When I was 15 I saw Ted Chippington open for The Fall at the Powerhouse in Birmingham and I can quite honestly say that was the point at which I thought I’d like to be a stand-up.

“Before then I didn’t think I could do stand-up because I thought you had to be confident and funny and talk about stuff people were interested in.

“But when I saw Ted Chippington I realised you could stand still and talk really quietly and not appear to be interested in the audience and I thought I could probably do that!”

Stewart went on to make his name in the 1990s in a comedy partnership with Richard Herring.

Then there was the acclaimed but controversial Jerry Springer the Musical which he co-wrote and directed, novel The Perfect Fool and, in the last few years, a host of stand-up shows and one-off TV appearances.

A new TV series – Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle – earlier this year brought him firmly back into the public eye.

“It’s really great,” he says, punctuating his explanation with barks of laughter.

“I’ve never had so many offers of gigs and they’re filling up more then they ever have, and also they’re filling up with people that know what they’ve come to.

“Sometimes, particularly at weekends, people come to see some comedy and you’re not necessarily what they want.

“This time, having done the TV show, people know they’re coming to something quite slow, turgid, repetitive, so they don’t feel disappointed!”

He is, of course, being disingenuous.

Expect If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One to include his views on Richard ‘Hamster’ Hammond, coffeeshop loyalty cards, advertisers hijacking his favourite song and plenty of trademark intelligent irony.

He smiles: “Stand up was my first love, and it is again now having been all around the houses.”