Award-winning comedian Stewart Lee brings his A Room With A Stew to the Theatre Royal Bath on Monday January, 18.

A Room With A Stew, is a work in progress towards the material for Series 4 of the triple BAFTA nominated Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

Throughout this extensive tour, the comedian will explore new subjects, try-out brand new material and will cut and add sections … see it live now ahead of transmission.

Max Castle spoke to Stewart to find out more:

What is the idea of the Room With A Stew tour?

Stewart: There’s a fourth series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle for BBC2 in the spring of 2016, so I am trying to work out six half hours of new material, which I will be working out on this tour.

Most stand-up comedians on television use teams of writers now like in the 1970s, although they don’t admit to it, but that doesn’t really work for me because I don’t really do jokes as such.

It’s more about mood and attitude so you can’t just buy in things wholesale from the anonymous humour content providers that all the others use.

It is quite hard to generate that amount of material, even if you talk as slowly as I do, and repeat yourself all the time, and use pauses.

The tour is billed as work in progress towards the TV series, and prices are pegged a bit lower than the other TV stand-ups wherever the theatres will allow it, and where we’ve managed to stop tickets showing up on tout websites like Stub Hub at massively inflated rates.

Hopefully, as it continues, I’ll have about three hours of material on the go, although I won’t perform all of it every night!

How is the writing of the tour and the fourth series going?

Well, it’s a challenge this time. I’ve got three or four half hours on the go which are coming together nicely but the news is so volatile at the moment.

I recently re-jigged and expanded an old bit about the banal tabloid newspaper assumption that comedians need to do more anti-Islamic stuff, and don’t because they are scared, and this bit was working quite well. But since the Charlie Hebdo murders people’s reactions to it are all over the place.

You can’t really use irony because people in the public eye have said much worse things for real than comedians would say as jokes.

I have a funny half hour on the go about UKIP but any massive fall or rise in their fortunes would probably change how it works.

Initially I was worried about doing it on tour because Paul Nuttalls of UKIP was leading a campaign to have comedians that did jokes about UKIP banned from theatres, but he seems to be saying the opposite of that since the Charlie Hebdo murders.

He is now saying that making jokes is a democratic right in a free society so I am pleased about that.

I mean, I’ve got kids and a mortgage and this is my job, and you do worry about would you be allowed to carry on working if a far right group like UKIP got in.

I’ve got another half hour on poverty, which is always going to be topical sadly, and a bit on urine, which I think is timeless.

Will touring help you to generate material?

I’m really excited about going on the road. I like sitting in the van and having music on in the day, even though I miss the kids.

But I can’t remember a time in my life when the country has seemed so fragmented in terms of politics, culture, wealth, attitudes, so it’s going to be fun seeing how badly and well different bits go in different places and then bringing what I’ve learned from that to bear on the finished routines when I film them for the telly.

In the ’90s, when comedy was labelled “The New Rock and Roll”, you were a kind of youthful comedy pin-up. But now you are really showing your age, and no-one is going to buy a ticket to see you based on your looks. Do you feel ashamed of what has happened to you?

Well, I find that question quite offensive. You’re comparing a man in his late 40s to a boy barely out of his teens, and I don’t think many people would benefit from that comparison. I am what I am.

In a way my physical collapse has been a huge advantage, it’s given the stage me some tragedy, some gravity.

Also I am going deaf, and now wear hearing aids, which has been an interesting challenge on stage.

My knees are shattered and don’t work – I think I ruined them during the 200 dates I did of a show where I pretended to be Jeremy Clarkson kicking a tramp to death – and that has had an interesting effect on my physicality.

If I jump off stage now or climb things there’s a genuine element of pain and danger. I’m like Eddie The Eagle or something.

Stewart Lee: A Room With A Stew tours to the Theatre Royal Bath on Monday, January 18 at 7.30pm. Only a handful of standby tickets priced at £15 each are now available – maximum two per person – from the Theatre Royal’s box office on 01225 448844.