Russell Howard speaks ahead of Birmingham show

“I’m not particularly worried about turning 40, I’m just worried about dying.

“I mean I’m constantly scared of death. I get panic attacks about dying, it’s terrible. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and my brain goes ‘you’re going to die, you’re going to die, you’re going to die’.”

Russell is getting ready to break records as part of his new world tour – Round The World. It stops off in Birmingham tonight and tomorrow when he headlines the Genting Arena.

The shows follow his most recent tour, Wonderbox, which was another international sell-out and saw him entertain 285,000 fans at 40 shows across the UK and Ireland in 2014, as well as sold-out runs in the USA, Australia and New Zealand.

He’s become one of Britain’s most successful comics after initially gaining attention as a panelist on Mock The Week. He converted that early promise into major success by driving the biggest TV show success story on BBC Three with Good News. Since then, he’s encountered the weird and the wonderful.

“I get asked mental questions by the audience. This year, there was this 49-year-old woman who said she’d never been kissed on her birthday – and asked if I would do it.

“So I kissed this 49-year-old lady and it turns out the request was sent by her husband, and I looked a lot like her son. It was really creepy. So I kissed a woman while pretending to be her son for her husband – it was one of the weirder moments of my career.

“I didn’t tongue her though, just lips.”

Russell will be performing in the round, with his stage in the middle of the venue. He’s glad to be on the road for a tour that includes 10 consecutive nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

And though he’s worried about the ageing process, he’s also glad that he grew up when he did. He thinks kids today have a harder time of it than he did,

“I spent a lot of my childhood sat on a wall thinking, waiting for my mum to pick me up. It’s that time your brain can just free associate, and obviously that’s really good for you because your brain kind of drifts hither and dither, but then, if I’d have had an iPhone, I’d have been all over that.

“So I think it’s quite hard to have an imagination, because an eight-year-old brain cannot possibly compete with the internet.

“And it must be awful if you’re a kid and you’re getting bullied at school. At least when I was a kid, you went home and you didn’t get bullied anymore. Whereas now, you can still get bullied at home. If that’s happening, that must be pretty terrible.”

Russell’s success and affable nature make him an obvious candidate to step up and launch his own chat show. After all, other comics have made the transition from the stage to the TV chat show lounge.

“I think if I was going to do something, I’d like to do it with interesting people, or with celebrities but talking to them about different things rather than pushing what they’re doing.

“When you see the American chat shows, they’ve got so many ideas about what they could do with the guests. I did stand-up on Jimmy Fallon and they had loads of sketches and ideas, we don’t tend to do that here. Everyone just sits down and chats. So it would be really great to do something like that.”

Laughter is ever-present in Russell’s life and the funniest person he knows is his mum. “Her mind should be donated to science. She did the eulogy at my nan’s funeral recently and it was so hilarious and warm it left the room in tears, both happy and sad. She’s an incredible woman.”

Being a stand-up comic puts Russell into the unlikeliest situations and he’s had plenty of peculiar experiences during his life on the road.

“I’ve seen a comic urinated on. I’ve been punched for having an affair with a man’s wife; I was 18 and had never met her. I’ve seen a woman hand a noose to a man at a festival in Bristol. But the weirdest thing was when a woman threw her sex toy at me.”

Russell’s life is all about the funny and even his dreams have him in stitches. He clearly remembers the funniest one he had.

“I was a cat working in a travel agent and we were having a really busy day. I booked a couple a lovely weekend break in Barcelona and they thanked me by letting me lick some cream from a bowl.”