Jack Dee: " I just really, really love West Sussex"

He is delighted to get back to it now, especially a string of dates across his beloved Sussex, including Crawley, Brighton, Bexhill and Eastbourne. Nearby he is also playing Guildford and Southampton.

“We had everything cancelled in March 2020, and I was mid-tour. I was about ten shows in when the curtain fell. It was not a total surprise, obviously, but it was pretty dramatic when everything had to stop.

“In the context of what other people were going through, obviously it wasn’t huge, but I had spent about eight months travelling around very small venues around the UK to get the show just how I wanted it, and it had got to the point where I was doing the bigger venues.

“I did Liverpool and then Blackpool. And then it all stopped.

“It was quite a spooky atmosphere everywhere. I was driving back and the roads were suddenly very quiet. I had to get some paracetamol and they were asking questions about why I was needing it. It was all pretty strange.

“But I just came home, and like everyone, I treated the first three or four weeks as just like a bit of a sabbatical.

“I just treated the first lockdown as extra time to get to do a few things that I wouldn’t have otherwise done.

“And then it became apparent that it was going to last considerably longer. I had previously been asked to write a book.

“We got in touch with the publishers and they were keen, and that’s the book that is coming out in October 2021.”

What Is Your Problem?, published by Quercus, sees Jack take life’s biggest dilemmas and answer them with his “unique and very professional” advice.

“Writing it was good. It kept my mind in the same zone I had been on on the tour. I was still writing comedy which is what I like doing.”

But now he is more than ready to be back on the road.

“I have had to change quite a lot of the show, changing the whole structure of it. Usually a show will evolve over 18 months, but when you come back to this one after 18 months, there are lots of areas that are no longer relevant.

“The whole world has changed. Everyone’s mindset has changed.”

The pandemic, for one thing.

And Jack certainly doesn’t regard it as a comedy no-go area.

“I think you grab the pandemic by the horns. I don’t skirt around it.

“ If people are minded to go to a comedy show, you make the assumption that they are to going to be ready to have some fairly harsh ideas thrown at them.

“And I think that that is a healthy part of processing it all, to say ‘OK, we have all known people who have been ill and people that have sadly died, but we can still look at the bigger picture and have a laugh at ourselves within that bigger picture.”

There is an element of having to coax people back out, Jack admits.