Comedian, writer, actor, TV presenter and national treasure Griff Rhys Jones brings his latest stand-up tour to the region next month. It’s less about jokes and more about chatting to the audience, he tells What’s On - which is just as well, because he does like to talk…

Remember Rowley Birkin QC, the rambling old barrister from The Fast Show who would witter on about randomly disparate events before admitting he was “very, very drunk”? Interviewing Griff Rhys Jones is a bit like that. A consummate raconteur, the 71-year-old (no, I couldn’t believe it either) talks non-stop - with barely a pause for breath - regularly chuckles to himself and continually veers off-topic to another unconnected yarn. It’s mercifully more endearing than infuriating, and in many ways reflects the haphazard nature of his varied career, which he cheerily admits can no longer be easily pigeonholed.

“I don’t know what to put in my passport anymore - I have to fake it. If someone asks me what I do for a living, I say ‘God knows.’”

Griff has been performing for 50 years, and is probably best known as one of the stars of award-winning sketch show Not The Nine O’Clock News, where he forged a hugely successful double act with Mel Smith that saw them front their own prime-time TV series between 1984 and 1998 - and even introduce Queen at Live Aid.

Since then, he’s gone on to embrace a range of roles, including stage acting - he has two Olivier Awards to show for it - and presenting TV shows (including 10 years of It’ll Be Alright On The Night) and travel documentaries, the latter of which he admits came from his “inability to say no”, as well as his curiosity about… well, pretty much everything.

“When the BBC said they’d like me to become one of their people who goes around the world saying how beautiful things are, I said okay,” he claims. That attitude has also seen him risk life and limb by doing stunts like bungee jumping and riding shotgun in a drag race car (“you’ll see me trying to find the seatbelt”) just to appease the director’s “need for jeopardy”.

It all provides great material for anecdotes and tall tales, of course, and his autumn touring show, entitled The Cat’s Pyjamas, is sure to feature a few. Or will it?

“I have a couple of people I work with, Mike and Will, and they say it’s very difficult to organise my show, as I never tell the same story twice,” chuckles the comic, instantly digressing into one. I drag him back on to the origins of the show’s unusual title.

“I just like the expression - we had all sorts of funny titles about being groovy, but then I decided on The Cat’s Pyjamas. My daughter said ‘You can’t call it that,’ and I said why not, and she said ‘Well, you’ll have to be good.’

“As I explain to the audience, all this doesn’t mean I’m the cat’s pyjamas; it means they’re the cat’s pyjamas.”

My query about whether the title is in fact the family-friendly version of a well-known expression involving part of a canine’s anatomy takes him down an especially interesting rabbit hole.

“Well yes, and I do know a bit about this actually,” he says, almost conspiratorially. “I thought I’d call it The Dog’s Bollocks, but there was a general feeling that I couldn’t. Then I looked up the dog’s bollocks in the Oxford English Dictionary, and do you know the term is accredited to Mel Smith!

“I don’t think the idea is that Mel made it up entirely - I think most of London would dispute that - but the truth is, he is the first person to officially use it in a publication. He wrote a play [with Peter Brewis and Bob Goody] called The Gambler, and it was in that.

“It’s crazy. In 30 years of working with Mel, he never wrote a useful or good sketch for the two of us to do, and there he is.”

Rather than dwell on the poignancy of this nod to his late comedy partner (who died in 2013), he’s already off on another flight of fancy.

“Apparently, ‘the cat’s pyjamas’ was invented in the 1920s when American journalism was at its finest, and it was all about some woman who used to take her cat for a stroll while wearing pyjamas.”

Cats became quite a theme of our conversation at this point - how Griff unwittingly adopted one (Henry), which was then joined by a pregnant one, followed by kittens (“Henry is clearly not the father”) and so on.

“Maybe I should do a whole show about cats,” he mused, having already noted how he likes to talk to audience members about their dogs, before guessing the breed based on the theory that owners end up looking like their pets.

Interacting with the audience is a key part of The Cat’s Pyjamas, but unlike the first leg of the tour, the upcoming shows will see the advertised Q&A element brought forward in the running order, simply to ensure there’s time to fit it in.

“I used to say there’d be a chance for questions at the end, but by the time I got to the end of the show, I was looking at my watch thinking, there isn’t time, because the last buses are all going.”

Relying on the audience to provide interesting questions is obviously a risky business, but Griff’s wide-ranging interests and penchant for diversion make for fairly easy pickings - although he has noticed that the topics (topiary and elastic-waisted trousers among them) tend to reflect the demographic of the ticket buyers.

“My audience have a wide range of interests, which corresponds to their general age and maturity,” he says, acknowledging that interaction with younger people has become increasingly fraught with age-related woe in recent years.

“I used to get stopped in the street and people would say ‘Griff, I’m your biggest fan.’ Then it was ‘My mum is your biggest fan,’ then ‘My grandmother is your biggest fan’ - which is really alarming. Soon, it’s going to be ‘My ancestors were your biggest fans.’”

And as much as he enjoys the variety of his other work - he’ll return to acting next year to star in a stage version of I’m Sorry Prime Minister, an update of the TV show Yes, Prime Minister - he admits that his return to stand-up comedy, which began soon after Smith died, has been hugely rewarding.

“There’s something liberating about being able to walk on stage and just start with whatever has just happened to you,” he says. “It’s such a wonderfully new thing for me, even though I’ve now been doing it for 10 years.

“But I love doing it - I’m a comedian again.”

Griff Rhys Jones’ The Cat’s Pyjamas visits Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury, on Tuesday 14 October; Malvern Theatres on Sun 2 November; Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry on Thursday 13 November; Cheltenham Town Hall on Wednesday 26 November

By Steve Adams