Stand-up star Lee Mack tells Su Carroll why he feels lucky to be making a his living out of comedy

THE star and writer of BBC One's BAFTA award-winning comedy, Not Going Out, has decided he is leaving the house after all with a new stand-up tour called, appropriately enough, Going Out.

Demand for tickets to the Lee Mack tour was so great – over 170,000 tickets sold for 97 shows – that further dates were added, which means him playing Plymouth Pavilions twice this year.

As well as his hit sitcom and awards for live performances, Lee's had great success on shows such as Have I Got News For You, Would I Lie To You? and They Think It's All Over.

With his lively, quick wit, he's as happy on the stage as he is writing and starring in Not Going Out. He says he works as hard on the writing for the stage as he does for the screen.

"I find it gobsmacking that people would write a whole new stand-up act every night," says Lee. "I would struggle to do it. The sitcom helps dramatically. You have no choice but to sit there and write. You just treat it like an office job and fill your 10-hour day.

"The main difference with the sitcom is that it's all about the writing. There are so many factors but without the script you've got nothing. With the stand-up there's a limit to how much you can write. With stand-up it's half writing, half trying it out.

"With the sitcom it's more like an office job, you work nine to five and record at night once a week."

Lee grew up in Blackburn and, when he was 14, decided his chosen career path would be as a world champion golfer. His careers officer told him he was starting a bit late.

But Lee soon discovered another passion.

"Comedy is something I always thought about doing from the age of about 15," he says.

"My first feeling was that I was going to do this at some point in my life. I used to watch Friday Night Live with Ben Elton and it was a world away from my home town. He was a certain type of person that I wasn't.

"Around 14 or 15 comedy was my equivalent of pop music. I was really into The Comic Strip and Friday Night Live and The Young Ones. People have to feel like they're being different to their parents. In the 1980s watching comedy was like being into punk.

"I was 10 years from thinking about it to doing it. In 1993 I met my girlfriend, now my wife, and I told her I wanted to do comedy. I had never told anybody else.

"When I started out there were a lot more eccentrics, a lot more misfits. comedy had a kind of punk philosophy. Now they are very much businessmen. They know what they are doing."

Lee's Going Out tour is already a massive success and promoters had to add extra dates to satisfy demand. It hasn't always been like that, he admits.

"I've been around quite a while and it's only in the past two or three years that I've been playing really big venues," he says.

"I only ever wanted to play the circuit. I'd have been happy playing to 50 people. I was lucky I came into it quite late. I'd done a lot of manual, low-paid jobs so getting £70 in cash for 20 minutes' work on a Friday night seemed phenomenally well-paid to me."

I ask if he notices a difference in audiences in different parts of the country.

"It's something I get asked a lot," he says. "It's one of the great myths. They don't change that much. An audience is an audience. There are little general rules of thumb. An audience inside London is slightly harder to please. When you do something every night, you don't really give it much thought any more. You just do it.

"Funnily enough, the biggest variation about whether a gag is good is not where you are, it's the shape of the room, or a certain style of the venue, or the night of the week. On a Saturday night people would probably have been out for a beer. Other nights they might have been racing in from work. And it's a lot better in the winter than the summer."

It bodes well for his two Westcountry gigs.

Lee Mack is at Plymouth Pavilions (0845 146 1460) on Thursday, March 11 and Wednesday, November 24.