‘I LOVE MY JOB, BUT I DON’T GLORIFY IT’ – Lee Mack and the Hidden Struggles that leave audiences Speechless!

The trouble with comedians, I tell Lee Mack sternly, is that they might reduce the O2 stadium to tears of laughter, but in person they aren’t very funny. I am hoping he might be the exception to the rule.

“No pressure then, thanks for that,” responds Mack, face contorting into an expression that would have Would I Lie To You? viewers rolling if not in the aisles, then definitely off the sofa, but doesn’t translate so well into print.

If that sounds a bit harsh, I don’t mean it to be; Mack is one of the most amusing chaps on telly. He’s got a genuine Everyman affability and as keen a wit as you’ll find on the panel game circuit. I would place him somewhere between Frankie “potty mouth” Boyle at one end of the spectrum and Michael “Hello birds! Hello sky! Fotherington-Thomas” McIntyre at the other. Where does Mack see himself on the pH scale of comic acidity?

“I don’t look at comedy as a sliding scale of offensiveness,” he says. “For a start, I don’t watch other comedians, and also I think there are very few things you can’t make a joke about. The only benchmark is whether or not it’s funny. We’re all basically decent human beings so if 3,000 people are laughing at a joke then it’s worth telling. If a subject is a bit near-the-knuckle then you better make sure the punchline is hilarious enough to outweigh the shock value. I’m sure there must be an equation that encapsulates the perfect shock-to-humour ratio.”

Maybe so, but it would appear that Boyle hasn’t yet figured his mathematical X from his Why? The Scotsman has been roundly lambasted for the tastelessness of his televised gags about the Queen at Christmas and for his boo-inducing performance at the Give It Up For Comic Relief concert.

“I don’t find Frankie offensive,” says Mack, mildly. “I think it’s really bizarre that these days a comedian can make the news just for telling a joke. And comedians can fill Wembley. How on earth did that happen?”

Southport-born Mack, 44, has seen comedy transformed in the 19 years he’s been in the business. He’s had solo tours, bestselling DVDs, more panel show appearances than Boris Johnson, and his autobiography Mack the Life was published last September. His laugh/groan sitcom, Not Going Out, is about to begin its sixth series.

Yet there’s a freshness to his performances, thanks to his gift for quickfire ad-libbing and downright silly wordplay. A list of the top 50 quips of the Noughties published a few years ago included the Mack gag: “I remember the last thing my Nan said to me before she died. ‘What are you doing with that hammer?’” Boom-tish! It’s the way he tells them.

Unlike many comedians, whose stock-in-trade is anecdotes about family life, Mack prefers to keep his children out of the limelight. He won’t even name them, but will own up to two boys “and a princess”, variously aged eight, six and one. Could it be that having moved south with his wife, Tara, whom he met at Brunel University, he’s given them pretentious London names he’d rather keep shtum about?

“What’s so pretentious about calling a kid Preston Settee?” he comes back, quick as a flash. “Besides, I might live in London, but I don’t live in London.

“I live in East Molesey, which sounds like somewhere invented by Beatrix Potter, but is the first place you get to in south-west London where you don’t feel like you are in London. I only realised I wasn’t in London when I went to vote in the mayoral election and I was told I couldn’t.”

To make up for it, he has a hedgehog in the garden (“smashing!”) and noisy parakeets in the trees. They make for a welcome distraction as he sits at his desk and, literally, thinks up jokes all day.

“I know comedians who go on weird day trips in order to have random experiences they can talk about,” he snorts. “They’ll go on their own to Thorpe Park waiting for something hilarious to happen. That’s really sad.”

Perhaps they haven’t enjoyed the same fertile hinterland as Mack, whose youth included a string of badly paid but marvellously off-the-wall jobs; picking apricots, mucking out Red Rum’s stable, being a Pontins Bluecoat. He has little need then, to cannibalise everyday minutiae for material.

“I used to sit my wife down with a cup of tea and read out an entire episode of Not Going Out, acting all the parts, and she would listen and be terribly impressed. When our first baby arrived, she became less interested, with the second it was worse and now I’m not even sure she knows I’ve still got a sitcom on telly.”

But he does, and with the Best Male TV Comic 2012 award under his belt to coincide with the start of the sixth series, his stock is high, though he takes it with a liberal pinch of salt.

“It’s nice to get a gong because it means some other comedian didn’t, but really, who cares? I can’t even begin to remember who won the Oscars and those are the proper awards.”

His latest run of Not Going Out promises to be a good’un. It’s an old-fashioned format without any great plot beyond low-status guy (Mack) shares flat with high-status girl (Sally Bretton), and who might get together but never quite do. Miranda Hart used to appear in it until her solo career took off meteorically.

Having seen a preview of the new series, I found it funnier than ever; a great piece of ensemble acting. But then, I’m not sure it can be called acting, because whatever Mack does he is being himself.

“Going on stage is a performance, it’s an act; you’re playing a version of yourself. I don’t give it a lot of thought. I clock on, I tell jokes, I clock off again.”

Irrationally, that sounds a bit brutal, because although we don’t expect surgeons to operate outside the hospital, we do expect our, and I mean “our”, comedians to be on duty 24/7.

And maybe it’s exactly because they’re not, they can pack stadiums when they are.