Jack Dee

But he admits very little beats the feeling of being onstage, especially after a six- year break.

“When stand- up goes well, it’s almost as if you can fly,” he says. “There is so much risk involved that the tension can become very addictive.

“During the warm-up shows, I’ve been thinking, ‘Wow, why have I been away so long?’”

That’s not to say he didn’t suffer some nerves when he came back to the stage, after focusing on his television career – both in Shooting Stars and as the much put-upon Rick Spleen – and on writing his autobiography, Thanks For Nothing.

“At the first warm-up gig I did after that six-year break I felt like a complete novice,” he admits. “I didn’t know where to begin. But almost immediately it came back. I’ve never taken it for granted – to do it well takes real application. But I’ve been gigging all year now and it’s felt really good.”

Hearing that, it seems strange that he ever decided to take a break.

“I had done a very, very long tour and I was tired,” he says. “The day you stop enjoying stand-up is the day you should stop doing it. So I had to step away from it and recharge my batteries.

“Now, I’m glad to say I’ve got my passion back.”

Dee has always relied on observations from his own experiences for his comedy – which is perhaps why he has been able to produce six best-selling DVDs over the past two decades.

And for the father-of-four, living with teenagers has provided a wealth of material.

“My take on it is that adolescence should really be regarded as a form of mental illness,” he says.

“Once you’ve accepted that, everything makes more sense.

“It’s very alarming when adolescence happens to your children. Overnight you lose the person you’ve been living with for ten years and someone else entirely emerges. Suddenly you’re living with someone who has metamorphosised into a lunatic.”

Rolling review of life

Going out on tour and making jokes about it is how he deals with it.

“That’s the only response I know to most things in life,” he says. “Anything like that forces you to look at yourself, so other strands from your life, such as religion and drinking, come into the show.

“There’s no sense of mission or self-analysis. It’s simply funny stuff which has occurred to me.

“I have never been a comedian who writes to a theme – that’s why I never give my tours a title. I find it impossible to paint myself into that corner.

“The only thing which keeps recurring is that the show is a rolling review of my life.”

Throughout is the miserable character which has become the persona he adopts both onstage and off – as seen in Shooting Stars when hosts Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer went to great lengths to get him to crack a smile.

That character also filtered through to Dee’s onscreen alter-ego in sitcom Lead Balloon, Rick Spleen.

“I go to great pains to say that Rick is very different from me but no one believes it,” he says.

“I really like that sense of someone who is the author of his own unhappiness and can’t see that complaining about everything is only making things worse.

“You’re blaming everyone else for your problems and can’t see that you are to blame.

“There’s nothing funnier than someone who thinks life has colluded against them. That’s not a rare comic attribute – Woody Allen is the master of that style of comedy – but it all works brilliantly for me.”

Often the comedy in his stage act is spontaneous, as proven when he encouraged his audience to text comments and thoughts to him as an encore on his last tour.

“What is really exciting is when you get an idea just before the show begins,” he says. “Then you go on stage and the new material immediately gets a big laugh.

“I keep putting in new stuff so the act remains very fresh. It’s not very attractive when it becomes glib. I never want it to become set, like a play.”

• De La Warr Pavilion, Marina, Bexhill, Saturday, March 30. Starts 8pm, from £20. Call 01424 229111