'You can get too hamstrung by worrying': Ross Noble talks ahead of Birmingham and Shrewsbury shows

And on top of that, he’s got two children.

Not surprisingly, therefore, today’s topics of conversation range from running over camels to creating a giant robot version of his head and how to fire his imagination.

His UK tour runs from April 19 to May 31, with dates at Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn on April 20 and 21 and at Birmingham Symphony Hall on May 16. It can be difficult to predict how it will turn out.

“I can tell you one thing to expect,” he says. “I’ve always been a fan of breaking away from the thing of a comedian just standing in front of a blank stage with a couple of lights, a stool, and a table with some water on it. If you can’t go two hours without a drink of water, there’s something wrong with you. If you go and see Phantom of the Opera, he’s not on stage constantly swigging water, is he?

“So I don’t do that. I like to create massive sets. I’ve always loved the idea of this big, theatrical, rock and roll set and then just this bloke walking on and talking.

“So on the stage I’ve got a massive head, which is my head, and it’s connected by veins which are LED lights. It’s like a giant cyborg Total Recall version of my head, and I walk out through the two halves of my head. It’s totally unnecessary but it makes me laugh a lot. And then it’s whatever pops into my head after that.”

Ah yes, whatever pops into his head. Noble’s shows are largely improvised. So while he might have a few recurring themes, no two shows are ever the same. There’s a method to his madness, however, and material that catches fire is developed over successive evenings.

“What I do is I go on stage at the beginning and improvise, then if something tickles me I might write it down and then the next night, I’ll go back to that idea,” continues the Geordie comic.

“But I might go back to that idea and do it a bit differently. So it’s never quite the same. I like that white-hot heat of being in the moment. So even if an idea was good, I won’t repeat it exactly the same because that’s last night’s thing, I’ll just take the essence of it and do something new with it. I get distracted quite easily. Whatever’s in my head tends to dance to the front. When my show’s at its best I think it’s when my brain is open to anything.”

Noble’s tour started in Australia, where he did 40-odd gigs. After that, he played in then visited New York and LA before returning to Australia for a couple of months. He loves being Down Under and was there before the recent spate of fires.

“It was brilliant. We were touring around the outback performing at all the desert venues,” he says. “It’s mad, they’ve got all these little outback towns with art centres because the Australian government spends money on the regions. So you turn up to this place in the middle of nowhere and there’s all these state-of-the-art facilities. There’s not a huge amount of comics who bother to go out there, so they appreciate it.

“So by the time I get to the UK in April 2020, the tour will be rolling along nicely. I’ll just have to remember not to get muddled up and talk about smashing into kangaroos in the car.”

Before we go any further, we ought to clear one thing up. Noble didn’t smash into any kangaroos in his car, though he did very nearly kill a camel.

“We were up in Broome and they have this tourist thing where they have 30 camels all tied together. They must have been taking them back at the end of the day and the problem with camels is, they don’t have any lights on.

“So we were driving around the corner and were like, ‘What’s that?’, and suddenly we were almost on top of this camel.

“When they’re tethered together like that, if you hit one then it has a domino effect… We could have been the car that broke the camel’s back.”

Noble has been around the block. The unpredictable randomist turned to performance after discovering at the age of 11 that he was dyslexic. He joined a clown troupe and sold balloons as a stilt-walker, before deciding to become a comedian after winning tickets to a comedy show. After so many years, he doesn’t get nervous before going on stage.

“No, because there’s nothing to be frightened of. I think this applies to life as well: there’s no point worrying about what’s going to happen, you may as well just deal with it when it happens.

“I think you can get too hamstrung by worrying. Don’t worry about the past, don’t worry about the future, just enjoy the moment you’re in. Could you just write in the article, ‘At this point, Ross got into a Lotus position and floated three feet in the air’?

“I do think I’m best on stage when I’m playing. And some people might think this is an emotionally stunted, man-child way of looking at it but I think it’s nice to make everything about playing.

“Because if you do that, it doesn’t matter if you’re winning or losing, you’re just playing. For example, if I say to my kids, ‘Tidy your room’, they won’t. If you go, ‘Let’s see how many socks we can throw across the room into that laundry basket’, you get the tidying done and everyone’s had fun. I think that might be the secret of happiness: just turn everything into a game.”