Jack Dee has sound reasons for taking his comedic talents back on the road.

“I want to spend less time with my family,” he says.

“I think that’s a very good reason for touring.

“Everyone with children will surely agree with that. I think a little bit of absence from your family is actually a good thing.

“There are far too many diligent parents out there overdoing it and putting us to shame.”

This, of course, is nonsense. Jack is a proud father of four children and has been happily married to Jane for 23 years (who doesn’t remember him yelling ‘I love you’ to her when he broke out of the Celebrity Big Brother House?).

He’s been regularly spotted out and about on holiday in Dorset with his family, at the Knoll House Hotel and at the Bovington Tank Museum.

Following one visit, Jack said: “I come to Dorset with the family every year to relax. The Tank Museum is an excellent educational and entertaining experience and the kids are really into it.”

But that hasn’t stopped Jack from mining family experiences to provide much of his new tour’s material.

Observations about home life and living with teenagers, will, he says, form a part of it.

“My take on it is that adolescence should really be regarded as a form of mental illness,” he says.

“Once you’ve accepted that, everything makes more sense.”

He reckons it’s alarming when adolescence happens to your children.

“Most parents don’t believe it will happen to them.

“But overnight, you lose the person you been living with for 10 years and someone else entirely emerges.

“Suddenly you’re living with someone who’s metamorphosed into a lunatic.”

He deals with it by going on tour.

“But that’s no help to people who aren’t stand-ups.

“That’s the only response I know to most things in life.”

A past winner of the British Comedy Award for stand-up, he’s also got a dozen other strings to his bow.

He’s already beloved by Radio 4 listeners as the chairman of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, the ‘antidote to panel games’ and has appeared on a raft of shows from Top Gear to Never Mind The Buzzcocks, as well as appearing in the sitcom Lead Balloon.

He found playing the character of Rick Spleen easy, although: “I go to great pains to say that Rick is very different from me, but no one believes that!”

He loves Rick’s sense of ‘someone who is the author of his own unhappiness and can’t see that complaining about everything is only making things worse.’

“You’re blaming everyone else for your problems and can’t see that in fact you are to blame,” he says.

“I’ve always found that very amusing, and it’s always been a big part of my stage persona.

There’s nothing funnier than someone who thinks life has colluded against him, someone who believes that everyone has got it in for him.”

He gives an example from one of his tweets.

“When TV went digital, I tweeted, ‘No warning, no nothing, no signal, no TV for a week’.

“I got a massive response. The idea was that I was paranoid that no one had consulted me – even though there had been a banner about the switchover across the screen for the last decade.”

You can only be like this on stage if you can laugh at yourself in real life, and Jack does.

“You need to be able to step away from that persona.

“That’s how you can get a perspective on that attitude.

That characteristic does exist within me.

“But because I’m feeding off it, I’m very aware of it and can identify it more accurately.”

Jack Dee appears at the Lighthouse, Poole, on November 21.