Hello Stephen

Anyone who has ever set foot on a stage with only a microphone and a collection of stories, impressions, one-liners and anecdotes an audience will hopefully find funny will tell you that stand-up comedy is a tough racket. But when you bring a little extra baggage onstage in the form of a CV that includes some of the most hilarious television of the last decade, it can be even tougher.

Stephen Merchant is well-known for co-creating The Office, Extras and An Idiot Abroad with long-time collaborator Ricky Gervais, and having such credits to his name made his return to stand-up comedy with his show, Hello Ladies, now available on DVD, “quite intense”. While he has a number of strings to his bow as writer, director, broadcaster and actor, Merchant started his entertainment career as a stand-up, admitting that “the first week I did really well, the second week I died on my arse.” Over the course of five or so years, he continued to perform semi-professionally but once his television career started to gather momentum “I kind of knocked it on the head – I never took enough pleasure from it.”

When he made the decision to take a second shot at it with Hello Ladies, which wittily chronicles the lanky, six-foot-seven Merchant's at-times awkward interactions with the opposite sex, he found “people had certain expectations, so it was like building the act from the ground up and starting again but this time with this weight of expectation.”

He needn't have worried though – Hello Ladies is funny stuff, with Merchant displaying a stage presence and storytelling style that deftly combines confidence and self-deprecation. “What I'd done originally was more of a character piece,” he says of his early comedy. “Here I wanted to be more honest, more of a storyteller. I guess I wanted to define myself for people because I'd been seen in various things and I was known for working with Ricky but there's a kind of comic attitude I have that people may not be aware of. I thought it was a good opportunity to tell people where I'm coming from, and the romantic strand was the thing I latched on because it always struck me as the funniest thing of the stories I would tell, even just amongst friends. My romantic misadventures seemed like the best way to introduce myself to audiences.”

Not to mention endear himself to audiences, although Merchant certainly doesn't come across as clingy or longing for the audience's affection. “I wanted people to go away from Hello Ladies felling relieved, I guess, and feeling that they may have learned something about me. I mean, I like one-liners and I like surreal comedy but the confessional kind of comedian is probably my favourite. And once you're on TV, there's this assumption that your life is somehow easier, which it is in some ways, but it doesn't change who you are at your core, and the hopeless idiot you were at the age of twenty-one is still lurking inside you. So I wanted people to go away from Hello Ladies thinking 'Jeez, at least my dating life isn't as bad as his!'”

Stephen Merchant plays the following dates: