Robert Webb stars alongside Jason Thorpe in Jeeves & Wooster at the Oxford Playhouse

The A34 was closed so I was five minutes late for my interview with Robert Webb, meaning that our time together was cut rather short, and he was mightily displeased.

Trying to get 1,000 words out of such a curt exchange was therefore challenging, despite my best efforts.

Which was a shame because so many hold Webb in such high regard — his days on Peep Show, The Mitchell and Webb Situation and That Mitchell and Webb Look (which won a Bafta for best comedy in 2007) earning him the tag “comedy genius” and a legion of life-long fans, me included.

Perhaps the 42-year-old was having a bad day, reluctant to leave his London home and his lovely wife and two small children for life on a tour bus on this bleak January morning. Even so, he was still remarkably unforthcoming.

He didn’t want to talk about his schooldays, even though his comedy partner and fellow Peep Show star David Mitchell — Oxfordshire-born, bred and educated — said they shaped his comedy years. “I had a normal childhood in Lincolnshire and enjoyed my school days, although the highs were few and far between — so it’s hard to assess.”

Neither did he want to elaborate upon Mark Watson’s recent observation that Cambridge’s Footlights was no longer a fast track into comedy: “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

He also refuted saying in an interview that he was “feeling around for what happens in a post-Peep Show world”, adding that he’d known about the part in Jeeves & Wooster for four or five months now, and was also in Neville’s Island in the West End until a few months ago — closing that door firmly shut on that question, and so it went on.

And yet here he is, about to appear at the Oxford Playhouse in Perfect Nonsense as one of the most cheerful chaps in literary history. That certainly confirms a passing comment from a well known stand-up that comedians are rarely extrovert anywhere but on stage. And anyway, Webb says he never wanted anything to do with stand-up, comedy writing always being the plan, hence Cambridge University where he hoped to hook up with “like-minded people like David”.

“Cambridge was never a fashionable place to be, but I went there because I wanted to write stuff rather than do stand-up comedy. So no, Cambridge doesn’t guarantee you a TV contract but I wanted to do more than stand-up, to write and then turn my ideas into sketches — not stand on stage and crack jokes, but create characters.”

So writing funny stuff and performing it yourself is different?

“I always wanted to perform my own material and Channel 5 and Channel 4 agreed,” says Webb. “Life’s too short to write material for other people.”

Platitudes over then, let’s just get to the point and talk about his new show Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, a chirpy piece most at odds with the man I’m talking to today who seems to have left his sense of humour and manners at home. Let’s hope he’s saving it all for the stage.

“I’m really excited about Jeeves and Wooster because it’s such a high-energy part and a great show, which I played in the Duke Of York Theatre in the West End and then agreed to resurrect for the tour, so I’m looking forward to it.

It’s a big, energetic, theatrical show, and very different from the characters I play on TV,” he says. Not that this is a novelty. Webb made his West End debut in Neil LaBute's Fat Pig, followed by a role in Raving at Hampstead Theatre in 2013, which made another stage splash.

For those of you who haven’t seen or read it, Perfect Nonsense is adapted from the beloved works of PG Wodehouse, when a weekend in the country takes a turn for the worse. Bertie (Webb) is called upon to steal a silver cow creamer whilst playing matchmaker for a pal, relying on the ever-dependable valet Jeeves to ensure everything turns out well.

“There’s a strong farcical element to it,” Webb confirms.

A big departure for him to be playing someone so cheerful, then?

“Rather than a miserable, truculent bastard called Jeremy?” he asks, referring to his Peep Show persona. Not exactly.

And then Robert Webb brings our enlightening chat to an end by telling me that my time is up because I was late.

So there we are, game over.

While cursing him on the way home, however, I discover that he’s tweeted me on my return to say: “Sorry I was grumpy. One of those mornings. Hope you got what you need. Rob,” and suddenly there is hope that Jeremy is always going to be Jeremy, but Rob is still Rob.

Robert Webb stars in award-winning new play Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense
Tuesday, February 10, to Saturday, February 14 
Box office: 01865 305305 or www.oxfordplayhouse.com