Do you still enjoy coming to Edinburgh? Do you feel obliged to come every year?

“I do. You need to be at the heart of the comedy community, you need to see the new things that are coming through. I also think it’s good to get a clear run at something, working something out for three weeks every day in the same room.”

Does it keep you relevant within the comedy community?

“In terms of needing to think yourself part of an emergent scene then I think it keeps me relevant on some level. Other comics will tell you, ‘I don’t need to do Edinburgh any more’ as if they’re better than it. That’s exactly the point at which they become worse.

“To be honest, if I hadn’t got in with The Stand [Lee performs at related venue the Assembly Rooms], I don’t think I would go anymore. I like the fact that if you perform for The Stand you’re relatively uncontaminated by the nasty things about the Fringe. In a way that puts me in a false bubble… and I’m not held ransom by a management company. Also, it’s easier for my generation to do things for the love of it because we have a degree of education and financial security that people 20/30 years younger than us will never have. It’s going to be interesting seeing what kind of art is made by people in their teens and 20s now when they’re labouring under the shadow of massive financial debt – with things costing so much more to do all the time, that inevitably makes them more conservative.”

You’re certainly relevant enough to sell out a big Fringe venue run in advance…

“There’s a weird thing at the moment where I seem to be perceived as two things simultaneously: one being someone who always sells out and is huge, and then the other is some unknown loser that no one likes – which rather depends on who writes about me. It’s quite good to be honest – it’s not pleasant to be recognised, talked to by strangers, or photographed… Last night a Guardian journalist took a photo of me eating an apple in the street and put it on his website. Things like that are really disconcerting.”

Do you ever rest on your laurels when you’ve got a sold out crowd that will likely laugh at anything you say?

“There’s definitely a degree of comfort in the fact that people have decided to come and see you and know who you are, but rather than taking that for granted I think you have to use it as a mandate to do worse and more strange things. You have to make them active participants in the live experience rather than them just sitting back, and one of the ways you do that is to make them feel like you don’t want them to be there, they’re at fault in some way, and that rather than you being their servant they are there for your benefit. I want them to tap in to what they’re being told, and have the fun of making all the connections themselves. It becomes an act in which the audience are half of it.”

What do you now want to tackle in stand-up? What so-far-unfulfilled ambitions do you have?

“Most of the ideas that I have about theatre, films, or books, I can do more economically, more directly, and more interestingly in stand-up.

“It’s quite interesting to think, ‘Wait, what if I just carried on?’ Not many people have done that – lots of people used stand-up as a means to an end but what if I did it for another 26 years? It would also be interesting to become, just for a short period, so big that I could do 8,000 seaters every night and see if there was some way I could ruin the idea of stadium comedy – blow it apart from the inside out and still give people an exciting stadium comedy experience.

“I might make a folk record next year. That’s not me having a midlife crisis.”