About this time last year Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Russell Kane was invited to appear on Celebrity Mastermind.

He chose the life and work of Evelyn Waugh as his subject.

“I thought right, I bet you all the other comedians go look how funny I am, ‘I’ve gone for an ironic subject’. So I thought I’ll go for a proper subject, the one thing that people – because of the way I speak and my comedy – probably don’t expect me to know anything about: English literature.”

Kane won having fluffed only one question. It will not have surprised those who knew that after leaving school to be a shop assistant, he later enrolled as a mature student at Middlesex University and got a first in English literature.

“They probably expected me to one of those people who toss up vacuous philosophical-sounding statements that require no intellectual discipline – no names being mentioned – but I’m not that type of person.

“I believe in rigorous long-term academic knuckling down study and inquiry and critical analysis of information.

“With my background, I thought, ‘How can I show that off, but mix it with hey, here’s my hair, it’s like Jedward?’”

The show was a glorified memory test, he says. “It was more a feat of memory than anything. Anyone can do that. You put a gun to their head and anyone can do it.”

The point is he actually did it. And anyone who saw his Smokescreens And Castles tour (the DVD is out in November) would agree such an assessment sounds eerily like the person he dissects in that show.

Kane’s father was a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and proudly owned the only private property in his street in Westhill-on-Sea, Essex.

“That’s what I try to commit to these poor f***ing 15-year-olds who write to me and say, ‘Hey, I wanna be a comedian, how can I do it?’ I’m like – don’t you understand how simple it is?

“Imagine if a skinny bloke went to big bloke down the gym and said, ‘I want to be like you, how can I get there?’

“Well obviously you go to the gym hundreds of times and do a boring workout every day without any knowledge and you might succeed, and only then do you have the right to even dare ask how you get there.

“People want the quick answer without the hard work.”

The idea is that success (in Kane’s case, being a 2011 Barry Award Winner; presenter for I’m A Celebrity, Freak Like Me and Britain Unzipped; and having his debut novel The Humorist nominated for the Anobii First Book Award) comes from a little bit of talent combined with “unglamorous working your nuts off”.

“The sad thing is most people, it turns out, are lazy b******* who can’t be arsed.”

That ruthless, perhaps dynamic, attitude is one of the positive things he says his dad gave him.

If Manscaping, the follow-up show to Smokescreens And Castles, was about Kane trying to locate himself in the world, with his contradicting identities coming across like the follies of male grooming, then his new show is him turning his sociological, gender and class obsessions back to familial matters.

When it dawned on him that he might be one of those blokes who never has children, his mates in the pub burst into laughter. Kane is too young to be thinking about kids, they said. He’s at the height of his career. It’s his breakthrough year. And anyway, men can have kids in their 60s.

“That cliché that women have the corner on the biological clock, well men have it too. Their whole body tragically ageing to the point they start knocking out sprogs when they have silver hair and the whole thing is a bit shameful.

“I wanted to explore that.”

To do so Kane will deliver and raise his own hypothetical baby on stage. He was interested in how someone without children might see the reality of bringing up offspring until they are 18. “That could create an interesting effect. It could be the famous death when you hear an American comedian talking about British culture and it is like an alien looking from the outside in.

“I imagine all the stuff that might happen, so really you are laughing at the difference between those who have children and those who don’t, and also the stories from my own relationship with my father.”

He reckons he’s not the only one who fantasised about what future children might look like – even when he was a teenager.

He says there are none on the horizon at the moment – despite the tales from Manscaping. In that show he detailed scoring with a glamour model and being absolutely petrified about it – feeling feminine and pressurised into sex like a passive participant.

“I’ve barely a girlfriend on the horizon and I make a joke about that.

“This is a catch-up on my year of filth,” he snaps. “A recap.”

  • Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Church Street, Friday, October 19. Starts 8pm, tickets £17.50. For more details, call 01273 709709