On Sunday, on Fox News, an American terrorism expert named Steven Emerson revealed that the entire English city of Birmingham was a no-go area to non-Muslims. I was worried, as I have a standup gig there as part of my Room With A Stew tour on 2 May, and last time I played my old home town, in 2014, the crowd, though reasonably diverse, was pleasingly weighted towards the educated middle-class white liberal Guardian-reading audience, which I pen occasional columns like this in order to cultivate.

Brief hijab counts in the merchandising desk queues after live shows proved that, on the last tour, The Lowry, Salford, was my most Islamic audience, and Totnes my least, though Devon folk retain the same suspicion of 21st-century life that characterises the vid-blogs of many Islamist commentators.

The “Muslims in the Merch-line” test is not an entirely accurate punter survey method, skewed as it is by the disposable post-show income of different demographics. I have tried to get provincial venue staff to seat my audience in specific sections of the theatres, split along racial and religious divisions, in order to make my consumer analysis easier, but there seem to be all sorts of objections to this from our “gay” friends in the “Politically Correct Brigade” ™.

The trick now, it would appear, will be to try to write standup material that can be consumed by both the Islamic and the anti-Islamic customer bases, both of which are growing fast in modern Britain. Working these two comedy retail opportunities simultaneously presents an exciting challenge for the modern humour vendor. Perhaps this can be done by deploying a wafer-thin tissue of irony, to be folded and unfolded around the act’s content, depending on the specific demands of the immediate marketplace.

I am currently in talks, with both Roy “Chubby” Brown and Citizen Khan’s Adil Ray, aimed at creating a central databank of Islamic-related standup content, which can be loaned out to different comedians and finessed in any direction, by way of facial expressions, tonal vocal shifts and amusing headgear, then targeted towards the racial and religious breakdown of the specific audience.

But Birmingham, apparently, is now totally Islamic. Will there be time before 2 May to spin my new two hours of comedy to address the concerns of Birmingham’s suddenly exclusively Islamic audience? Perhaps they will assume that my new Anti-Islamic Observational Comedy section is in fact a celebration of difference, like Ricky Gervais’s microtonally nuanced Derek, and I will be given the Freedom of the City of Birmingham, such as it is?

But I wouldn’t want the freedom of this new Islamo-Birmingham now, as there will be no pubs. I still remember the bad old days of the 1970s, when Birmingham was controlled by Quakers. Oats were all there was to eat, and the only drink was lukewarm drinking chocolate in a chipped mug with a picture of the pig from Pipkins on it.

Like most of you, I absorb news coverage passively like a meat sponge, factoring in a degree of market-led bias, depending on whether I am reading a neo-Nazi tabloid or a Marxist-Leninist broadsheet, such as this one. Although, on the three or four occasions when I have been involved in news stories, what’s written has rarely tallied exactly with my own experience.

I never attended the 2011 showbiz event where the Metro newspaper claimed I made Michael McIntyre’s wife cry; I could not get the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts to agree that a contentious item of underwear he insisted appeared in a banned opera I directed had never been in it, despite me having seen every performance. And when I returned home from the poll tax march in 1990, expecting to see news coverage of me and my friends, including a nurse, being crushed by disproportionately numerous police horses, I saw only a punk rocker in Trafalgar Square set fire to a bin and flick Vs at a statue of First Sea Lord Admiral Cunningham, whom he blamed for the hated levy.

I should have expected this. In 1982, as a 14-year-old scout, a patient Akela coaxed me up a Peak District cliff face. On the slab next to us was a group of disadvantaged youngsters, given a rare taste of self-esteem by donning climbing gear. A documentary crew, for the as-yet to appear new broadcaster Channel 4, filmed them. Sadly, the girl chosen to be the centre of the story wasn’t making much progress. With the subject at the edge of her comfort zone, only a foot or so off the ground, a cameraman slid underneath her on his back, shooting dramatically up past her, as if she was some distance into a significant ascent. Then she was hauled bodily up the face and interviewed again at the top, the landscape rolling out behind her, the undeniable evidence of her achievement completing the fabricated narrative arc.

I watched the documentary when it was broadcast some six months later. The Matrix dissolved around me, still a virgin, and barely sentient. News was a branch of entertainment. Facts were mutable, and didn’t need to displace a good yarn. It will be fun to go to Birmingham and stand on stage and pretend the city is entirely Islamic. This will make for a funny story. But I am a comedian. What was Fox News’s excuse?