When people think of fame, images may spring to mind of either glamour and showbiz or pain and misery. With his new show, Fame: Not The Musical, David Baddiel, still recognisable to many fromThe Mary Whitehouse Experience and his partnerships with Rob Newman and Frank Skinner, reveals a third way. “In the show, I try to demystify what fame is actually like by talking about the day-to-day mundane bits of the experience. If there is a social purpose to the show, it’s to say that fame appears to be this bauble that people either covet or it’s this tragic thing. Well, I’m trying to show how ordinary and stupid fame can be. It can be thrilling but it can also be annoying.”

“I’m happier as a person now than when I was on telly all the time. The ideal scenario is that you don’t feel so famous that things seem out of control but there’s enough fame so that people are interested in getting your stuff made.”

Having halted his stand-up career in 1997, Baddiel went on to become a successful novelist, radio broadcaster and film screenwriter (The Infidel movie which starred Omid Djalili is now being transformed into a musical). But when the chance to step back onto a stage presented itself, Baddiel gave it a shot.

“ I did four or five dates and it was fine, but I wasn’t moving the form on. I was doing what I’d done ten years earlier but not so interestingly and I stopped again.”

But when Baddiel was invited to deliver a talk at a 5x15 event, it helped him find the new approach he had been searching for. “I decided to talk about fame but not like stand-up where you’re trying to get a laugh every 30 seconds. I was surprised at how many laughs it got. And so I thought maybe this is a way of getting back into stand-up in a different way so I created it as a comic narrative about fame and the weirdness of it and what it does to a person.”

Analysing his own legacy to the British stand-up form, he observes: “No one had done an arena before us, and no one had been presented in an NME kind of way. Comedy was a little bit too serious and too worthy at that point, but then we came along to say that it doesn’t all have to be about politics, some of it can be about pop music and sport and sex. That really did change comedy in a good way and presented it to a younger audience.

Baddiel is certainly happy to be back in the stand-up fold once more, but he has plenty other projects keeping him going. He’s just been given the green light for a Channel 4 pilot of Sit.com, which aims to show how the modern family copes in this uber-technological age, and he has an upcoming Radio 4 show, Don’t Make Me Laugh, in which comedians desperately try to talk about inherently funny subjects without getting a laugh. There’s also a children’s book in the works and he’s penned an episode of the rebooted Thunderbirds, which is slated for transmission on ITV in 2015 (“it involves Parker in a big way, but that’s all I can say”).

But for now, Baddiel is looking forward to his stand-up tour and once more making a strong contribution to what he believes is the most vital live art form. “It’s the only one with a direct audience response which gauges whether or not it’s succeeding.The truth is that no one is successful in comedy without being able to make an audience laugh.”

David Baddiel will be at The Courtyard on Tuesday, February 11 at 8pm. To book, call the box office on 01432 340555 or visit courtyard.org.uk