Ithink I’ve made Russell Howard blush. I can’t be sure – we’re talking on the phone – but he certainly sounds flustered. The reason?

The publicity photos for his current – world – tour. He’s got muscles, and ruffled hair, and a distinctly pensive gaze.

He looks, I comment, like a poster pull-out from Mizz magazine (it’s supposed to be a compliment).

“Oh... well, I got into the gym,” he mumbles. “It’s quite fun, isn’t it, to be healthy?

If your day’s going badly, it’s nice to have a swim.”

He ruminates on this a little longer. “I haven’t seen those photos. I probably look like a t**t don’t I?”

Howard might be one of the most successful young comedians working in the UK right now but he could never be accused of letting it go to his head. He takes his mum on tour with him and is tickled by the suggestion he would even consider extravagant riders. “I’m missing out aren’t I? I just ask for sandwiches and fruit. I should be demanding a small dog at each venue and a hot tub.”

Next month he will play four nights at the Royal Albert Hall, in T-shirt and jeans. He’s not unaware of the venue’s prestige – driving towards it a few days ago he had to take a detour after nerves got the better of him – but “if I wore a flash suit I’d just sweat through it,” he says. “I wouldn’t feel like me.”

He lives in not-very-starry Leamington Spa with his long-term girlfriend, and his closest friends are those he’s known for years. The fact some of them are also rather famous now is a further source of amusement. He and old flatmate Jon Richardson – a comedian and like Howard, another TV panel show favourite – took great delight in being listed in Heat magazine’s Weird Crushes Of 2013 list last year.

“We’ve always had a lot of people calling us weird but we certainly wouldn’t have been described as crushes. Then again, number five was Adam Richman [host of reality TV show Man Vs Food]. The only time you ever see him is with a face full of dead animal. I think the crucial word is ‘weird’.”

Yet in spite – or perhaps because of – Howard’s aversion to the trappings of celebrity, the 33-year-old’s boyish, wide-eyed charm has seen him rise from studio theatres to arenas in just a few years.

People love him and it seems to be mutual; he has an affection for humanity that’s unusual in comedy. Until 2010 he was the nice, silly one in the bear pit of egos that is Mock The Week, and on Russell Howard’s Good News – voted BBC3’s most popular show ever – his favourite part is the unashamedly emotive “good news story” that closes it, usually a heartwarming tale of triumph over tragedy.

“I don’t set myself to ‘happy’,”

he says. “I do get angry at stuff. It’s just that the things that make me laugh are generally daft.” He recounts a recent episode where he and his tour manager were playing computer games with a friend’s six-year-old. “After about 20 minutes he stopped and went, ‘Dad, who are these guys?’ – like we were the world’s most nonchalant burglars. It was brilliant.”

Fans will be relieved to hear that despite the BBC’s decision to take BBC3 off air and turn it into an online-only channel, Good News is set to continue on BBC2 in the autumn.

He thinks it’s a shame about BBC3 though, which famously launched shows from Gavin & Stacey to The Mighty Boosh. “I think it will make it very hard for new shows to get an audience.

People don’t tend to stumble across shows online, they go searching for things they know. I don’t think Good News would have been the success it has been without being on BBC3. It was all the repeats as much as anything. It was on, like, six times a week. People couldn’t help but see it.”

Offering a condensed, comedic take on the week’s news, the show reflects our current media climate of rolling, 24-hour news approached from every angle, and is particularly popular with the under-25s – so much so that Howard was approached by two political parties (he won’t say which) to act as an advisor on winning the youth vote. He refused, mainly it appears, through feeling underqualified; this is a man who has 2.6m Facebook friends yet has never used any social media beyond MySpace.

Besides, he’s hardly Alastair Campbell: “I just do a daft show about the news.”

But he loves making Good News, which involves him and his team scouring sources from Russia Today to Fox in search of quirky stories. “It really highlights the sheer scale of lunacy in the world,”

he says fondly. “Stand-up’s quite solitary and it’s just nice to be in a room writing jokes with your mates.” He misses that sort of thing.

“I miss the camaraderie of the old days, you know – doing the Edinburgh Fringe and running around to latenight gigs. It’s very entwined with my youth. I remember me and [fellow comic] Al Pitcher sat in a Sainsbury’s café in New Cross exchanging numbers for gig promoters in London. Now he’s playing concert halls in Sweden.” And Howard is on a world tour.

“Yeah, yeah... it’s bizarre.”

He’s more quietly spoken and hesitant than his bouncy TV persona and tells me, rather unexpectedly, what a worrier he is.

“I’m incredibly anxious! I fear death with every waking moment. I have to go to bed with DVDs otherwise I scare myself thinking of the darkness that lies ahead of us.”

It’s one of the reasons he was attracted to comedy, he explains. “It gives you a place to put that anxiety. You’re terrified and then suddenly aware of the total ridiculousness of existence. I remember thinking that even when I was 11; why would you get a job when we’re all going to die?

Better to do something you love with your life, surely?”

Which is, of course, precisely what he’s done. You’ll never find Howard complaining about gruelling schedules or having to do interviews like this on his day off. “It’s a charmed life,” he says. “I love it. Even when people no longer care about coming to see me I’ll be doing 100-seaters somewhere.”With his mum waiting in the wings presumably?

“I love my family and spend a lot of time with them. My mum is just a brilliant person in every sense but especially in reminding you what to be excited by in life. Which is everything apparently. When she came on the tour, she was like, ‘Look at these comfy seats! Lovely!

Look at this room!” You can get a bit jaded now and again but seeing it through her eyes reminded me how bloody lucky I am.”

* Russell Howard, Wonderbox, comes to the Brighton Centre on Monday. For tickets, visit www.brightoncentre.co.uk