Wil Hodgson’s shows have never fitted comfortably into the stand-up comedy bracket. He thinks he’s more accurately described as a storyteller, but there’s never been a stand-up/storytelling genre – until now.

“I called the show Punkanory, to try to get across what I do, then when we saw this year’s Edinburgh Fringe brochure, there’s actually a new section for stand-up/storytelling. I’d probably have called the show something else if I’d known.”

For years, Hodgson has ploughed his own furrow as a comic; with trademark pink Mohican, an armful of tattoos and passions as diverse as Care Bears and Fern Britton, the former wrestler uses small-town tales from his native Chippenham to illustrate his take on bigger political matters.

He’s a proud feminist – something he’s previously illustrated through a hilarious championing of the Readers’ Wives “tradition” – and a vocal opponent of any sort of bigotry.

But at the age of 32, he thinks he might be mellowing slightly. “I certainly look mellower than I used to,” he says, in that distinctive West Country drone. “I’m getting on a bit for the full Cyndi Lauper face now.

I can get away with nail polish but I’m not sure I can get away with lipstick.”

While still rooted in his beloved Chippenham, his sixth Edinburgh show since he won the Perrier award for Best Newcomer in 2004 is lighter on “the politics and sociology”.

“It’s about a car boot,” he says, “and collecting stuff.” Hodgson has impressive collections of 1980s girls’ toys such as Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony and he says: “Some of the show’s about the logistics of what it’s like cohabiting with your girlfriend when a large part of your flat is full of the s*** you’ve collected over the past 25 years.”

Comedy wasn’t always a big part of his life. “I was more into music and films,” he says. “In fact, there’s a whole period of stand-up that passed me by because I was into other things. It was when comedy was in this ‘new rock ’n’ roll’ phase and it seemed a bit cool for me.”

He toyed with musical theatre – “I did stage musicals when I was at uni and I really liked them but realistically if you look like me you’re never going to be the lead in West Side Story” – before realising it wasn’t so much the singing and dancing he liked but the adrenalin rush of live performance.

“If I’d been good at wrestling and there was money in it, I might have stuck with that but it’s just not realistic unless you’re really hard. That cage-fighting s*** has ruined it now, anyway. There’s something really meat-headed about it, it was a lot more pantomime when I was a kid. Even the wrestlers who were massively ripped, you could tell they weren’t the kids on the football team or anything. There was something endearingly geeky about them.”

It was an early and typically shambolic performance by Johnny Vegas that shaped his stand-up. “I didn’t know you could do the sort of things he was doing. I thought it had to be more structured so I started off doing quite ‘straight’ stuff but I didn’t really get anywhere until I started doing the stories. It’s ironic because it’s definitely the less commercial of the two approaches, but I think it’s testament that if you do things your own way, you often get on better.”

*Starts 8pm, £7, visit www.carolineofbrunswick.wordpress.com to book tickets