‘A that time, the old order was collapsing; in 1987, the idea that anyone would look at a student show to discover huge comedy talent was over.” Thus Stewart Lee, remembering his early days when he read English at St Edmund Hall and did some student stand-up at gigs in the Jazz Cellar beneath the Oxford Union.

With a new DVD out and a well received book published this year (How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian), Lee might seem to be a confident success. But in an interview lasting much longer than the usual 15-minute chat, there were many pauses for thought and introspection and finding the right words.

Before doing a TV series next year, Stewart Lee is setting out on an 18-date tour to venues where he believes he has a “trusting” fan base — and the Regal in Cowley Road is one of them (typically he’s now not too sure about two other places, but it’s too late!). He’s testing us with new material in a show called Vegetable Stew because at the moment much of it remains unwritten and what there is is a bit chaotic.

But it did all start for Lee in Oxford, where he met his first writing and performing partner, Richard Herring [see Page 5], with whom he soon started writing for radio. Was there an immediate affinity between the two of them?

“Only by virtue of not being like everyone else. We both had an idea that we didn’t want to write sketches where people came in and out of offices and sat down and discussed things at tables. Back then, the BBC was really good at spotting new writing talent and that’s because the Weekending programme had a system whereby there was a meeting for the regular writers, and then there was another meeting for non-commissioned writers.

“So you literally went to Broadcasting House, said you wanted to go to the non-commissioned meeting on the second floor, went up and there’d be 30 or 40 people there. And the producer would tell us the areas they wanted covered. As simple as that.”

Lee and Herring were in at the start of the Chris Morris-Armando Iannucci radio hit On The Hour and struck out on their own in shows for Radio 1. Then Lee hit the stand-up circuit. “I was doing then much the same as I do now: quite slow and thoughtful. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Eventually, some people began to realise that what they hadn’t liked wasn’t a mistake: it was what I actually wanted to do! That’s when reviews of me went from saying I was boring and monotonous to hypnotic and captivating!”

A crucial time in Lee’s career came with his involvement in Jerry Springer — The Opera, which he co-wrote and directed and about which there was an unholy row in 2005. It was thought by some to be blasphemous and there were thousands of complaints, but Lee, clearly still angry, apportions the blame quite precisely.

“People tend to say that there was religious and specifically Christian opposition to it, but there wasn’t.

“There was an enthusiastically organised protest against it by an organisation called Christian Voice. Among their Christian policies is promotion of English national identity, asking if Islam should be allowed in Britain, anti-gay and anti-cervical cancer smear tests for teenage girls.

“If journalists had done as much research into this group as I did, they might not have taken the protests so seriously either.”

But that phase is over and Lee is now very much back in the stand- up groove and what works and what doesn’t (he talked to me of the “hanging cadencies” in Dave Allen’s TV work and the shortcomings, as he sees them, of the sort of shows fronted by Michael McIntyre). If he gets all the ingredients of his Vegetable Stew together in time, next Wednesday at the Regal should be very interesting indeed.