What do you do when the phone doesn’t ring at the time you expected for an important conversation or, in my case, interview?

I whiled away a minute or two while I was waiting for Dara O’ Briain to call by adding a Ronald Colman moustache and a bit of a beard to his photograph.

The result made the Mock The Week presenter look like a cross between footballer Wayne Rooney and the actor Timothy West. In build he is getting to be more like Friar Tuck, in spite of Gordon Ramsay’s on-screen endeavour to encourage him to eat healthier nosh while on tour.

Talking of famous people, on the Derby leg of Dara’s current 104-show tour, he went through his usual routine of engaging the audience in conversation.

One man told him he worked for the police as a performance analyst.

Another man said he was a lorry driver, while at weekends he was Robin Hood for the Robin Hood Society.

The man next to him said he played the Sheriff of Nottingham.

In the second half of the show the police performance analyst pointed to a third man and said to Dara, “Ask him what his name is”.

So he did. The man looked up and said rather sheepishly: “I am Arthur Merriman”.

“So there I had before me, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin Hood and his ‘Merrymen’,” Dara said.

He treasures such moments and regrets the ones he assumes he misses.

Dara was born in Wicklow in 1972, which means that he’s only 36 and incredibly successful! If he wasn’t so amiable I’d hate him.

He studied maths and theoretical physics at University College, Dublin. At the age of 22 he won the Irish Times National Debating Championship and the National Irish Language Debating Championship.

“You have the gift of two gabs,” I told him. He rather liked that.

“Yes, I can talk well. I am probably ten times better at that than the average punter; but there are thousands of them who come to my shows, so there’s someone probably 10,000 times better at it than I am,” he said, revealing his affection for numbers.

After university he started working as a children’s presenter for RTE, not a great achievement in Ireland, he once said. Once in, doors open quickly and easily. But he wasn’t satisfied with settling for an easy career on the box. Out of hours he took to the road on the Irish stand-up circuit.

He commented later: “I did the trip from Donegal to Dublin to play to six people; then I turned round and drove home again. I did about three or four years playing to a load of bad rooms, but learning as I went. It’s not bad when someone gives you £40 for standing up and telling jokes.”

Three Men In A Boat, the TV comedy-doc he did with Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath, has just been repeated on BBC2; his second dvd, Dara O’Briain Talks Funny Live In London, comes out on November 17; and his latest tour calls at St George’s Hall next Thursday. There are still a few seats remaining – the last time he came two years ago only 600 were sold.

He greeted the last bit of information with great good gusto: “Ah, then I needn’t do the interview!”

He once said that his last meal on earth wouldn’t be salad. He looks like a lamb shank-and-potatoes man to me, one who enjoys the thick of things, especially talk, badinage, conversation, banter.

“I like the flow of ideas, when someone gives you something and you take it and then something new pops up into your brain. That’s fantastic,” he said.

During our exchange – he talking rapidly, me stumbling to write it down, pick the next point of entry check progress overall – he let on that he has an affection for David Hockney’s painting. The day after his Bradford show he is due at Bridlington’s Spa Centre.

Mr O’B sounded somewhat amazed and delighted when I told him that the Bradford-raised artist, 71, has a house in the town and a studio and has been painting the landscape of East Yorkshire for the last four or five years.

“I love his work; it’s always great to see a late flowering. Are his landscapes on display up there?”

Dara once said the worst aspect of touring was being on his own in a hotel room. So why does he undertake such big tours, especially when the dosh from his TV work and dvd sales must have given him financial security already?

“Television is to a certain extent a promotional device for the live work. I try not to let on to the BBC. You have to be doing this otherwise you cannot call yourself a stand-up; you become a former stand-up and the guy off the telly. It’s what you have to do,” he said.

Desperately trying to recall the name of another comic who does long tours, I mentioned Lee Evans.

“He tours once every three years,” said Dara. “He starts off with small places, warming up for the 10,000-seat events. Jimmy Carr tours 150 shows. Frankie Boyle does more than 100. I take two months off. One hundred and four working nights out of the year isn’t much.”

But there’s the travelling between gigs to take into consideration. Every performer I’ve ever interviewed says that as much as they love doing shows in different towns and cities, getting to those places can be a mite tedious, if not exhausting.

“You have to concentrate your energies for that two-hour burst. Your body gets used to dozing during the day so that you can be a firecracker in the evening.

“I do a lot of off-the-cuff stuff and that can get rusty if you’re away from it for long. You have to ease yourself back into it.”

At the start of our conversation, in response to something I said, he suggested that perhaps he was on television a bit too much.

“Nowadays especially, being on the telly is devalued by celebrity. I hate celebrity,” he said.

I’m sure a lot of people share his view, so do the people who run television take no notice?

“There are a million television channels and there are so many weekend magazines, they have to fill the space with something; and there is an easy supply of actresses falling out of nightclubs. One of the benefits of the credit crunch is it might just take the air out of the bubble.”

On the other hand it might succeed in doing what the Large Hadron Collider experiment didn’t do: end civilisation as we know it.

I wonder what Dara would say were he to meet his maker, prematurely. Perhaps, ‘So you do exist after all.’ He once said: “I’m staunchly atheist. I simply don’t believe in God. But I’m still Catholic, of course.”

Dara O’Briain is at St George’s Hall on Thursday, starting at 8pm. For tickets ring (01274) 432000.