With Romesh Ranganathan, you know he's joking, but you also know he's being serious beneath the drollness.

After all, this is a man who makes a living out of being honest, but funny with it.

"I don't really like other comedians, they are competition at the end of the day," he says wryly.

"It's not one of these things where we work as a team - we're not rowers. Other comedians' success is not something I enjoy. Ideally, they would fall to the wayside, leaving the way clear for me to ascend to my rightful place at the top of the tree."

The problem is, the stand-up, who is heading to Bournemouth's Pavilion theatre on Wednesday, November 9, is now up against potentially his toughest competition yet: his mum.

In 2015, the Crawley-born comic, who regularly appears on panel shows like 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Have I Got News For You and Mock The Week, travelled to Sri Lanka - he's of Sri Lankan Tamil descent - to meet his extended family for BBC Three docu-series, Asian Provocateur.

For season two - a grand six-week all-American tour of the US, meeting and greeting resident Ranganathan relatives - his mum, Shanthi, decided she was coming too.

"Obviously, she is a breakout star of the show. You work at a stand-up career, and she shouts at you, and apparently that's better than what you're doing. That's what I have to deal with," Ranganathan deadpans.

"She mothers me a lot," he says, explaining how, even though he's 38 years old and a father-of-three himself, she can still embarrass him.

"So we'd be getting ready to go and do something, and I'm in front of the director and the camera crew, and she's telling me I haven't moisturised..."

In theory, the trip could have been an emotional roller coaster, a spiritual journey with Ranganathan discovering different corners of his soul with each new relative, bonding with his mum throughout like never before.

Instead, he says, it was full of "horribly awkward moments" where "things didn't pan out", culminating in one particular moment where he wound his mum up so much, she stormed off and missed the only thing she'd genuinely wanted to experience.

"Yeah, she really missed the gospel choir," splutters Ranganathan, lapsing into hysterical, can't-get-the-words-out giggles.

"But, but - I don't want to ruin it - but we make it up to her."

Following the show though - and the gospel choir incident - Ranganathan has decided he's going to be a new and improved person from now on.

"My mum and I are close, but I'm not good at getting back to her texts. She'll text me and 10 minutes later text again to ask why I haven't replied. So I did enjoy spending that time with her, and I'm going to try and be a better son. I'm going to return calls.

"You take your mum for granted, don't you? So I'm going to do that less, that's my resolution."

Before braving the world of comedy, Ranganathan was a maths teacher and head of sixth form in Crawley, where he met his wife Lisa, but he doesn't miss it too much.

"I loved working with kids - I think kids are great - so the bit in the classroom I enjoyed, but everything else, I hated. So marking, staying on top of paperwork and all that stuff, I just wasn't good at it," he says, self-deprecatingly. "When you're rubbish at something, you don't like it."

Next up, following the tour and filming an accompanying DVD, Ranganathan is planning to take some well-deserved time off.

"I've been away all year touring, so I'm going to reacquaint myself with my wife and children, and then, who knows?"

Asian Provocateur is on BBC Three

To book tickets to see Romesh Ranganathan on tour, visit bic.co.uk