We talks to comic Micky Flanagan ahead of Birmingham dates

The stand-up, who plays Birmingham’s Barclaycard Arena from Thursday until May 20 before returning from June 1-3, took to the airwaves following the recent North London derby between his beloved Spurs, against Arsenal.

A Spurs fan, he offered such insights as ‘it’s nice to see footballers wearing gloves’ and ‘he’s passed it and he’s shot it – two of the key ingredients in football there’.

The satire coincided with the broadcast of his new series, Thinking Out Loud, which airs on Sky 1 every Monday at 9pm and is watched by 220,000 people.

Micky is a working class boy done good. He has risen to the very top of the comedy world. With his show-stealing appearance at The Royal Variety Performance, for which he was nominated for the Best Breakthrough Act at the British Comedy Awards, to unforgettable appearances on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and Live At The Apollo, added to his hilarious outings on panel and chat shows, he has become one of the best-loved comedians in the UK today.

His debut DVD, The Out Out Tour, was the number one newcomer in 2011. His follow up show was the award winning Back In The Game which became the biggest selling stand up DVD and tour of 2013. In 2014 Micky embarked on his Detour De France, which was a stand-out hit show for Sky1.

In 2017, he returned to Sky1 with a smart, funny and possibly provocative new series: The Micky Flanagan Detours. The new series has seen Micky declutter his mind of the big questions that keep us up at night. His arena tour runs from May – October 2017 and is his first proper stint gigging since 2013’s Back In The Game, which saw him playing a whopping 129 shows across the country.

Micky’s returned to TV and touring after taking several years out. He says: “It wasn’t a mid-life crisis. I think that’s too big a word for it. I’ve just had a couple of years of reflection.”

He started reflecting, on his third pint of Stella. “That will always get me reflecting. I had quite a big chunk of success and I decided I needed a bit of time off to not keep making decisions based on that success.

“So I walked about a lot, went to the pub, went on holidays. There’s a woman keeps walking around my house . . . my wife.

“I spent some time with her. And there’s this little boy keeps popping up. I spoke to him a bit more. My boy is 11 now, so it was a good year to spend with him. How long was it before they suggested I work again? Couple of hours.

“When the banner went up in the garden: ‘Daddy, go back to work,’ I knew it was time to return to the spotlight.”

In Thinking Aloud, Micky tackles such subjects as whether men are really from Mars and women are really from Venus, whether class makes any difference and the trouble with patriotism.

He has chatted to overweight people about why some people think they are offensive and other topical issues crop up.

“We’ve tried to pick up on topics that we thought people were having conversations about down the pub in a serious way, but also an entertaining way. Things like men and women, and patriotism – that is quite a serious topic, but we look at it in our own way by meeting some football thugs. Well, they’re not thugs any more. You’d better put that in otherwise they’ll beat the life out of me.

“The show about offence was quite odd – the range of things people took offence at was phenomenal. One person got really upset when we spoke to them about breastfeeding, another person was offended by fat people.”

He also met bodybuilders competing in Mr World and struck a pose.

“I never even knew there was a Mr World competition in Southport. There’s 30 or 40 men who all look the same; I didn’t hear one burp or fart. I thought: ‘This is what men are like now. Hairless and chiselled.’”

Life hasn’t always been so rosy for the East End boy done good. His career has taken a surprising number of twists and turns. Having grown up on a council estate in Bethnal Green, he left school with no qualifications and took his first job as a fish porter at Billingsgate Market. From kitchen duties in New York, to furniture making and even teacher training, it took quite a while for Micky to hear his true calling.

After taking a comedy course in 1996, Micky turned his attention to making people laugh full time. He stormed onto the scene at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001 and has never looked back. Nominations at both the Edinburgh Comedy Awards and British Comedy Awards have recognised Micky’s uncanny knack for relating to ordinary situations, while his razor sharp anecdotes about coping as an alien East Ender in middle class suburbia have seen the public take him to heart.

His show-stealing ‘out, out’ routine became so well known that Micky’s first solo tour was named the Out, Out Tour and went on to sell out more than 150 dates.