THE thought of interviewing Stewart Lee – the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever according to his 2007 tour – always leaves me nervous.

He’s a curmudgeon, isn’t he? A morose misanthrope who despises those people who will fill the Hall For Cornwall on Wednesday, January 20, and will shoot me down in flames with his inflammatory, clever tongue the moment I ask him something stupid.

But, of course, he isn’t any of that. Shock! Horror! It’s all an act and he’s a friendly, chatty man (no, he’s not that one) who frequently unleashes a peal of manic laughter which is rarely heard in his stage or television shows.

I spoke to him as prepares to tour A Room With A Stew, which has already wend its way round the country once, enjoyed a season at the Leicester Square Theatre in London and will form the basis of his fourth BBC Two series this year.

“I’m bringing the show back to places that sold out last time,” Stewart told me. “That’s why I’m talking to you – I don’t want to over-estimate how popular I am in Truro.

“I used to go as far down as The Acorn in Penzance, but the older you get and having kids means you want to play to as many people as possible without having to travel as much.

“Hall For Cornwall is a great size, a really good room. You often find the bigger places don’t have great rooms that work for comedy. That’s why I play three nights at the Oxford Playhouse rather than the bigger venue there.

“My act isn’t as improvised as it looks but I still need to hear the room and see people. It gets harder in bigger rooms and, weirdly, in really small places. With more than 250 people you have more chance for some of the mad bits to take hold. When there are less people they get embarrassed.”

With that Midlands burr, which seems to make every sentence sound ironic, he told me how much he loves coming to Cornwall. No, really, he was being genuine.

“I love going to Truro and I don’t say that about everywhere. I hate going to Carlisle, for instance.

“I’ve got a couple of friends in Truro – and there’s a really good record shop in the market run by a Born Again Christian. I love his eccentric, complex ideas of genre.”

Surely everywhere in Britain is the same nowadays though?

“It’s interesting – when I started stand-up in the ’80s and toured Britain everywhere was very different. In the ’90s everyone voted for the centre left and everything was homogenised. But now it feels different again.

“Cornwall feels very different to the south of England; it definitely has an increasingly distinct identity now.

“In a way your experience of the housing crisis is very similar to that of London. Londoners cannot afford to buy because of all the foreign money being invested in property, and Cornish people can’t afford to buy because of all the people being displaced from London.” That manic laugh again.

It must be odd for his two children, aged 8 and 4, to grow up with parents who are both stand-ups (Lee’s wife is the award-winning Bridget Christie), albeit a father who has won a BAFTA?

“Actually, the little one had a hard time at his first school because of it. Other parents either didn’t like what we did or were fans, which caused a bit of a problem. Other kids were saying, ‘Just because your parents are funny doesn’t mean you are’. We had to move him in the end.

“Anyway, the kids don’t find me at all funny – they think my wife is much funnier than me because she dresses in animal costumes sometimes. I’m just monotonous.

“My wife saw me the other night and the next morning said to my son, ‘Daddy was really funny last night.’ ‘Was he?!’ – he sounded genuinely surprised.

“It keeps your feet on the ground. In fact, my whole family do – my step-brother hates my act and my mother was always confused by it. They all think I don’t do it properly; they’re genuinely embarrassed by my work. My step-brother thinks I should be more like Russell Howard.”

After three series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle there was no enthusiasm from the BBC for a fourth, but then Sky showed an interest in commissioning two series, it won a BAFTA and the BBC were interested again.

“By the time they decide to do it I’m already on tour and so it takes three years between each series,” added Stewart. “It’s difficult because they don’t really get it – it takes a while to be able to write a series, I don’t have a load of writers in the background doing it for me.”

He has other things to concentrate on apart from his stand-up and TV shows. Stewart writes about music for The Wire, Uncut and Mojo among others and is particularly excited – if he can ever be described as excited – about curating this April’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.

“The idea of Japanese bands like the Boredoms and Shonen Knife on stage at Pontins in Prestatyn is half the fun of doing it.”

I wondered if Stewart now found himself in a place he probably never imagined – on the cusp of joining the ranks of stadium-filling comedians such as Michael McIntyre.

“My wife and I were just talking about that – I’ve been at the Leicester Square Theatre for about six months and it’s got to the point where people tell other people and it could have kept on rolling, the tickets would have kept on selling.

“A woman came up to me after the show last night and said, ‘You mentioned the show was going on TV. Is that a joke?’ I told her I was on my fourth series – she’d never heard of me. There are a lot more people like that coming to see me now. So you become a sort of … thing.

“I always do a head count of who has seen me before and now it’s only about a quarter of the audience.

“My whole act is to have disdain for the audience but that’s increasingly difficult when there’s a palpable sense of hysteria in the theatre.

“I’m amazed.”

He added: “I don’t think the stadium thing will ever quite happen – I’d rather have big numbers of people in smaller parcels; a run at the Leicester Square Theatre rather than a night at the O2.

“A stadium comedian is a bit like a stadium band – they need that big lighter in the air moment.

“Michael McIntyre can do it because he says, ‘I feel this and you do too’. But my act is, ‘I think this but I don’t like you or want you to think this’.”

He states that with the BBC in cost-cutting mode, DVD sales dwindling and online streaming gaining the artists very little recompense, the only way to make money as a comedian is live work.

“I’m 48 this year, I need to work until I’m 70 to shift all my debt. I work out that’s 11 tours and, with my act, that’s only about 48 jokes I need to come up with.”

That manic laugh again.

Stewart Lee’s A Room With Stew is at Hall For Cornwall on Wednesday, January 20, and also Theatre Royal Plymouth the night before. For tickets see www.hallforcornwall.co.uk and www.theatreroyal.com

As an extra bundle of joy we have a triple DVD package of comedy shows to give away – Stewart Lee’s Carpet Remnant World, The Alternative Comedy Experience and The Alternative Comedy Experience (Season Two), all for over-18s.