William Crossley braces himself for a ‘brain dump’ courtesy of comic Ross Noble

More than 20 years after starting out on the comedy circuit, Ross Noble is still one of the hardest-working stand-ups around.

His forthcoming appearance in Oxford is just one of 80 dates on his current marathon UK tour, with his signature improvised, spontaneous brand of storytelling and wit still to the fore.

He also toured Australia just before going on the road on home turf last September with Brain Dump, and has already taken the show to venues the length and breadth of Great Britain and Ireland, with next Friday’s Oxford date, one of the last on the schedule.

Brain Dump got its name not from Noble’s ever-active mind, which has made him a favourite on TV panel shows like Have I Got News for You and QI, but from something someone wrote about a previous performance.

He says: “I got it from a customer review on Amazon for one of my DVDs,” he says. “They wrote, ‘This is just like a massive brain dump’, and I thought ‘Oh yeah, that’s exactly what my stuff is! I’ll have that’.”

Noble is known for improvising large parts of his performances, but he takes the potential pitfalls of this style of stand-up in his stride.

He insists: “The ‘risk’ is all relative. It’s like driving a car; after 25 years you don’t get in a car and go ‘What if this goes wrong?’ If you hit a few bumps in the road you just think ‘Oh, this is fun, let’s bounce around for a bit’.

“The main change since I started out is that, because I’ve built up this really loyal audience, there’s more of a shorthand. When I first started, if I was talking about something a bit leftfield people would go, ‘Oh god, where’s he going with this? Whereas now that’s what people want, they go ‘Oh right! Where’s he going with this?’.”

Alongside his comedy work, Noble has taken on acting roles in recent years, with an appearance at the New Theatre in 2015 in the cast of The Producers and has made horror movie roles something of a speciality.

He adds: ‘It’s definitely easily for a stand-up to do straight acting than an actor to do comedy.

“In the horror movie Stitches – it sounds mad because I was playing a killer clown – I wanted to play it as truthfully as possible. I didn’t want people to go ‘Oh, that’s just Noble dressed as a clown’. I’ve just filmed another horror, and that’s a straight horror film; there are no laughs in it.”

One of his odder screen appearances was on the Australian TV comedy show It’s a Date, which poses a question about dating - and follows two sets of people as they grapple with the question. For his ‘date’, Ross chose Neighbours soap opera star Ian Smith, aka Harold Bishop.

Ross says: “That was my idea, so I only have myself to blame. It was a mate of mine’s show – he asked me to write and be in an episode.

“Afterwards I realised that I could have picked pretty much any Australian actress to date. I could’ve written myself a love scene! But when he asked who I wanted to go on a date with, I said ‘Ian Smith, who plays Harold Bishop’. We laughed about that for about an hour. But he agreed to it, and then the next thing you know I’m on a set sat opposite him.”

On UK TV screens, Noble is almost as much of a fixture on comedy panel show Have I Got News For You as regulars Ian Hislop and Paul Merton.

He says: “I absolutely love it. I was still at school when the show started, so it was a really big deal when I first did it. It’s still the top panel show on telly. Because it has been on for so long, it has got a really strong sense of what the show is, it has become very well-defined.”

On one appearance he and Paul Merton got every single question wrong and scored zero points.

He adds: “We did it on purpose. I’d done the show so many times, so I jokingly said to Paul ‘Why don’t we just see if we can score no points?’.

“It’s actually harder than you think, because when an obvious story comes up it’s really hard not to say the answer. Charlie Brooker was on the other team, and at the end he said ‘I can’t believe we won’ and Paul went ‘Well, we can’.”

Asked what his scariest experience on tour was, he says: “I was in New Zealand once, and I was on the phone to my wife. I put the phone down and it rang again. I thought it was her ringing back, so I went ‘Hi’ and this voice said ‘Hello’.

“It was a complete stranger who had rung every hotel in Auckland pretending to be my girlfriend. That was a bit terrifying. The thing is, someone being a fan is very flattering, but there’s a big difference between somebody liking your comedy and someone wanting to wear your skin as a suit.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time the attention from fans is very sweet and very flattering. But every now and then you get one where you go ‘Okaaaay… that’s a little bit scary’.”

Ross Noble: Brain Dump is at the New Theatre, in George Street, Oxford, on Friday, February 10, at 8pm. Tickets, priced £29.15, are on sale from the theatre box office, by calling 0844 871 3020 or online at atgtickets.com