Fans of comedian Jon Richardson – and there are millions of you out there – can breathe an enormous of relief. He has no intention of giving up stand-up comedy – ever.

In the run-up to his latest tour, Nidiot, the 32-year-old reassures us that, “I’ll be doing stand-up for the rest of my life. The opportunities that it grants you can’t be denied. Stand-up is both the hardest thing I do and the thing I enjoy most. There is no fooling anyone with edits or six people around you – it’s the purest possible art-form.”

He adds: “I’m very proud of being a comedian and having got to the point where people will come out to see me. They remind me that I’m good at it. Paranoia can set in the day after a show. But you’re never closer to the moment of remembering you’re funny than when you’re on stage making hundreds of people laugh.”

The comedian, who last year presented his own Channel 4 documentary, Jon Richardson: A Little Bit OCD, is also well known as a team captain on Channel 4’s panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats, and has hosted Stand Up for the Week. But his passion for live comedy is undiminished: “I itch to do new material all the time. Even when I’m on tour, I’m writing stuff for the next tour. I live near a comedy club, and I’m always trying out new material there.

“It’s such a buzz when you say something you’ve never said before and it gets a huge laugh in the club.”

He enthuses about his fans. “I meet a lot of people at the stage door. They always say they’re as weird as I am! Meeting me is a cathartic process for them. People want to know it’s OK to think some of the things I’ve thought. They say to me, ‘My husband has this compulsion’, and I think, ‘That seems really sensible – I might start doing that myself!’”

Explaining the title of his show he deadpans: “It’s designed to confuse radio DJs.

“A ‘nidiot’ is something different from an idiot. An idiot is someone whose problems are caused by not concentrating enough. A ‘nidiot’ is someone who makes his life more complicated by thinking too much rather than not enough. I’m not an idiot, but I’m definitely a ‘nidiot’!”

The show majors on the idea of how a perennial singleton and misanthrope is determined to turn into a more easygoing person for the sake of his friends and his future health.

“The main theme of Nidiot is being happy. Because I now live with my girlfriend, this is the first time I’ve gone on tour as a happy person.” A man who is unable to resist a gag, he adds: “Fingers crossed that something goes wrong by the time I record the DVD in October!

“No, the show is about me looking back and realising that nothing was really wrong – I created problems for myself by over-thinking things. For instance, I railed against the idea of relationships without understanding that 99 per cent of people go into relationships because they make you happy. As soon as I stopped fighting, I felt like a fish that had given up wriggling in a net.”

Even so, Jon admits, “I was worried that this was not my natural comic voice – people associate me with being pernickety and down. In the past, I was guilty of keeping myself like that just to maintain my comic voice. That was insanity. But I’m not that type of comedian anymore.”

However, Jon is quick to reassure us that, “Comedically nothing has changed in this show. I may have a girlfriend, but I still shout at the TV and at the squirrels in my garden. If anything, the list of things I shout at is even longer now. Sadly, I think the leopard can’t change his spots. It’s just that my perspective is different now. I’m complaining from the other side of the coin.”