Mr Saturday Night

“How are you?!” Michael McIntyre blurts, the excitement of the Edinburgh Festival coursing through him. “We met in Patisserie Valerie before the Fringe last year. And then you wrote that a stranger hated me.”

Uh-oh. In the offending article, I had indeed noted an American couple leaning over after McIntyre left the London café, enquiring who he was, before declaring that they hadn’t found him particularly funny.

“That person from another table was riled by my loud self-obsession!” he exclaims. Put like that and in retrospect, it does seem a bit sneaky reporting it, as does reiterating it in this feature. Written under a pseudonym no less. But it was a bit of background colour. And I’d bought him lunch so …

“FUCK THEM!” he cries, memories of that delicious croque monsieur obliterated to crumbs. “They had no place in that interview!”

After a little more lighthearted reproach, Mr Saturday Night elect simmers down into the affable interviewee I semi-stitched up last year. With a live DVD shooting next month and a pilot for primetime BBC One in October, pitching bouncy bouffant against bald head with Harry Hill on ITV, the 32-year-old has rather more to concern himself with than devious journalists.

“I don’t understand critics to be honest,” he says. “I was just reading that Stewart Lee isn’t allowing them into his show and I quite fancy that. I don’t see why you can have a roomful of people loving you, and it’s the one guy who doesn’t like you that gives you the average review.”

He elaborates: “I love critics good and bad, because they’ve really helped me. I’ve certainly had reviews that helped me sell tickets and without them I’d have been in real trouble. But once you’re selling and people know who you are, they come to see the show because they’ve seen you on the telly or they’ve seen your preview. That’s how the process works. Occasionally though, I’ve had an average review for a show where everyone enjoyed themselves and it’s just exasperating.”

For the record, I, like many punters, critics and the futilely opinionated, felt McIntyre was unlucky not to be nominated for last year’s if.comedy award. Usually mixing up his routines for every performance, “I was trying to get nominated, so I was banging out my best stuff every night. But it gets hard to do an impression of yourself, especially for that long. I want to try to remain funny throughout this festival and be changing things, working and building things, having fresh ideas. I think that makes it funnier in fairness, when something’s a bit more lively, a bit more real.”

Unfortunately for McIntyre, last year he employed this freewheeling approach during an extra show he’d added, with members of the judging panel in attendance.

“Four judges!” he laments. “You don’t want to be worried about things like that. It’s so difficult to keep your head screwed on and be funny, you need to stay relaxed and confident. You begin to know who the judges are, and if you spot them, you’re constantly flicking your eyes over to check how you’re being perceived. It’s a real horror of the heart that’s all for nothing when they overlook you. Obviously, I was annoyed in the botanical gardens when I got the phone call, but it didn’t last long, only until the end of the day really.”

This year, he completely sold out before the Fringe began and once again added extra dates, a situation he attributes to appearing on shows like The Royal Variety Performance, Mock The Week, and more recently, Big Brother’s Big Mouth.

“That was hard work, every day writing it, thinking about it and getting it right, then having it late at night which meant you couldn’t sleep after,” he recalls. “So it was quite intense, but really enjoyable. If I’d won the if.comedy last year and had no TV, I probably wouldn’t have sold out a single night beforehand and only a handful of tickets, so that’s the nature of it. I’ve worked myself to a position right now that I’ve got the opportunity to focus solely on stand-up, which is nice.”

He misses the greater opportunities for banter he enjoyed playing to smaller crowds, but as he builds up material in Edinburgh for his DVD and performing to 3500 people at the Hammersmith Apollo over two nights, he might reflect that broadcasting and big audiences are in his blood. His father, the Canadian Ray Cameron, who died when McIntyre Jr. was 17, wrote and occasionally appeared in the iconic Jokers Wild with Barry Cryer, before the pair started writing for Kenny Everett in the eighties.

“I don’t know much about his sense of humour,” McIntyre admits. “I think it was a little bit different, a bit harsher, more curt. Maybe I don’t remember his jokes, just him telling me off. I’ve got quite pally with Barry recently and he’s certainly never mentioned any similarities, never said ‘God, you’re just like your dad’. But I’m sure we have a similar way of thinking. My mum is quite funny but she never really had a career in it.”

A young family of his own restricts McIntyre’s international engagements, so for the time being, the Fringe remains the place for him to be.

“When I’m in Edinburgh, I just like to get out a bit, it almost smells different. Arriving is so intense. I came here just before the festival and it filled me with excitement and ideas. It’s nice to forget everything else for a while and simply think of the funniest things, how can I make them laugh more and more and more?”