Chris Addison has a Chinese takeaway to thank for his comedy career. Well, almost. The stand-up comic, now famous for his role as put-upon Ollie in The Thick Of It, says on his website: “I met a Chinese mystic at the northbound Stafford services on the M6 in the queue for sandwich prisms.

“Over an under-cooked panini, the mystic persuaded me to take a self-titled and largely eponymous solo show to that year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The mystic then got into an RAC van and drove off.”

It was a fortuitous meeting; Chris took the advice and ended up being a runner-up in that year’s Perrier Comedy Award. Ever since, he’s been busy crafting jokes in books, columns, on Radio 5 and on stage. He’s also created a sitcom, Lab Rats, and can be seen in teen drama Skins.

Oh, and he’s starred in the Oscar-nominated move In The Loop, a loose follow-on from The Thick Of It.

Not bad for the 36-year-old – but does his new stand-up tour, his first for five years, come as a surprise to fans?

“I’ve been doing [stand-up] for 15 years so it’s my bread and butter really,” he says. “It has been for many years.”

Indeed, he has been to the Concert Hall a few times before tonight’s show which kicks off at 8pm. “I’m familiar with the venue,” he says.

Cheekily, I ask him if he’s pleased that the railway station is close to the Hall so he can make a quick getaway afterwards.

“You’re feeding me jokes here,” he protests. “You’re just feeding me lines so you can put jokes in, that’s what you’re doing.”

Being a stand-up and a comic writer means that you have to constantly be on the look out for ideas. Where does Chris get his from?

“Depends really. My Guardian column [Funny Money] and books were written to specific briefs,” he says. “It’s not as if [the publishers say] ‘You’re gonna write a book and post it to us and we’ll publish it’.

“The best thing is to have a brief, to have someone draw some lines on a piece of paper, draw some boundaries – if you’ve got to think within that, it makes things easier.”

And he also appreciates deadlines too. As they loom closer and he knows he has a set to write, he manages to somehow switch on his gagometer.

“I read papers,” he says. “When you’re aware of the fact that you’ve got to write you’re just more attuned to the world and to the little things that you see that might work, that you might be able to turn into a story or an idea or a routine,” he explains. “It’s not like I do it all the time – that would be incredibly wearying especially for your family.” He chuckles.

“When you know you have to write something you’re on the look-out – that’s what happens.”

He makes it sound so simple. Indeed, watching his stand-up on shows like Live At The Apollo, he makes performing look so easy and he regularly has the audience in stitches. No wonder he’s nearly sold out tonight.

Chris finds it strange to seeing himself on telly: “It’s not very pleasant watching yourself as you will always see the things that you did wrong,” he admits.

“There’s a bit in the film where there’s something genuinely not right.

I can’t kid myself. It’s in there somewhere … somewhere in there there’s me messing up.”

Despite that, he finds it useful to watch the performances so he can hone and refine his act.

“There’s always a lot to think – there’s always stuff you can learn,” he says. “But it’s not an enjoyable process. You don’t sit there going [he adopts a booming, big-headed voice] “Well, look at me!’”

If you wanted to buy Chris a present then a copy of Viz Comic’s swearing dictionary might not be a bad choice. As part of The Thick Of It series, he’s had to cope with some foul-mouthed tirades from fellow cast members.

“We have a consultant on it, Martin Sixsmith, who had a job in the Ministry of Transport. He has a very close-up view of the Westminster scene,” Chris says. “When we got this script off the writers he said, ‘If anything you need to turn it up a notch because that’s what it’s like’.”

Indeed, he feels that people aren’t upset by the bad language in the shows, so much as the situation.

“Their real concern is not actually that the swearing is on a television programme – the thing they’re most worried about is that’s how politics can be conducted.”

But what about Chris’s Chinese guru? Has he ever seen him since?

“No, no, it was very much a one-off - I’ve looked for him,” he says. “Some say he never existed – if you look in Yellow Pages under Chinese Mystics you won’t find any.”

But, being so succesful, one suspects he doesn’t need any more advice.

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