After 10 years away from the road, Lee Hurst is on tour again with his rather ironically entitled show Too Scared To Leave The House. Brian Donaldson reports.

Whatever happened to Lee Hurst? A fair question given that the former panellist on They Think It’s All Over hasn’t performed a full tour for a decade.

He did dip his toes into the live waters with a series of shows last year entitled Man Vs Woman and he’s been rather busy running his own comedy club in London.

However his new tour, entitled Too Scared To Leave The House, is his first full-blown jaunt around the country for a long time and aims to tackle the things that frighten us.

“It could be about literally anything from global disasters to spiders to fear of dying or relationships,” said Lee, who turns 50 on Tuesday, October 16. “Anything you can think of that bothers you.”

Lee has always done things differently. As a young stand up, he shunned the route of ploughing every last penny into an annual jaunt to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival each August and made his name in his home city.

“I just stayed in London and cleaned up because all the comics had gone to Edinburgh,” said Lee, who once got into a planning dispute with villagers in Loose, near Maidstone, when he looked into getting his listed house replaced with executive flats. Lee had wanted to sell up because the area reminded him of his late father who had treatement for cancer in the area.

He made his breakthrough as the warm-up act on the Have I Got News For You? which led to appearances on that show. He made his name for showing off his sharp wit on BBC sports quiz They Think It’s All Over, sparring with the likes of Gary Lineker, Rory McGrath and David Gower for six seasons.

For the last 10 years, Lee’s main project has been running his own venue, the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green, which later became known as the TheFymFygBar.com. Today, it is closed down for a massive redevelopment. It is hoped the club will be up and running at the start of 2013, although Lee has tour dates running through to April.

Since Lee was last on the road, the comedy scene has changed hugely. Lee – who suffers from a form of arthritis called ankylosing spondylitis – does not fit in easily with the today’s skinny-jeaned, skinny-haired young male comedians but he is pleased lots of the old-school 1990s comedians are back touring again. Ex-Kent University student Alan Davies has just hit the road again, while Jack Dee and Harry Hill are both back doing live work.

“I was doing a set in the West End recently and Jack Dee turned up to do five minutes and he had some lovely stuff,” said Lee, whose mother lives near Eastchurch, Sheppey.

“Harry Hill did one of the last nights of my old club and he was as nervous as hell, pacing up and down, pacing up and down. The other acts were on and you could hear this hollow sound of his boots: boom, boom boom. He said to me, ‘why do we do it, why do we do it?’ Well, he went on and tore the place up and as he came off I said, ‘that’s why we do it.’”

Lee Hurst is at Tunbridge Wells’ Trinity Theatre on Friday, October 19. Tickets £15. Box office 01892 678678. His tour arrives at Folkestone’s Quarterhouse on Saturday, March 9, 2013. Tickets £15. Box office 01303 858500.