ALAN Carr is worried. The chatty chappie is rarely off the telly or the radio, but four years have passed since he last toured and he fears his fans may no longer remember that his first love was stand-up comedy, and it still is.

“My last show, Tooth Fairy, was four years ago now. If I were to leave a stand-up tour any longer, it would start to look like a comeback,” says Alan, who turned 35 three days ago.

“Stand-up is my safety blanket. I’m having such a great time at the moment, I hope my TV career lasts, but when it inevitably comes to an end, I’ll always have stand-up. I love doing live comedy.

It’s also nice to know that I won’t have to earn money by going into the jungle and eating crocodiles’ testicles.”

This autumn Carr will return to the road, embarking on a 33-date arena tour of Britain and Ireland in his new show Spexy Beast, and he has just announced he will be doing a Work-In-Progress warm-up in York on September 5. If tickets sell quickly at the Grand Opera House, and they surely will, then he will play there the night before too.

You sense he cannot wait for September to tick round.

“I have the best fans in the world,” he says. “People are ever so nice. I get kids coming up wanting to hug me. At live shows, you get such a warm welcome – I receive this tremendous sense of affection from the audience. I think people enjoy the communal experience of watching comedy together. It’s such a buzz. Oh, I adore stand-up!”

Express that love, Alan.

“Within reason, you can do whatever you want in stand-up. There’s no editing and you’re not hanging around for the ratings the next day,” he says.

“I really like the spontaneity of it all. You haven’t got to cut bits out to make sure it fits the 12 minutes before the ads. That’s very liberating. Hopefully people are laughing throughout it and cheering at the end.”

On tour, he enjoys tapping into the British tradition of live performance. “Last time, I played St George’s Hall in Bradford, where Charles Dickens performed A Christmas Carol for the first time, and the aura in that venue was incredible – it was like he had never left. You can really soak up the atmosphere in a place like that, unlike some of the more modern venues, where the night before they’ve had Teletubbies The Musical – On Ice!”

It will not surprise you that the host of Channel 4’s Alan Carr: Chatty Man says his stand-up style is “about chatting”.

“I’m into detailing the minutiae of life. I’m never going to do an hour on tugboats. My audience know what they want from me. The chat show has freed me up. My style is looser now. I’m happy to go off-piste,” says Alan.

Where might going off-piste lead him? “The show is about things that have tickled me that day. It won’t be about tugboats – well, only the first five minutes!” he promises. “Personal stuff always goes down well. I’ll talk about my other half and my dog. But in the end, it’s stand-up – it’s not Piers Morgan’s Life Stories. Thank God, I don’t have to burst into tears every few minutes! Rest assured, it’s an upbeat show.”

Alan will shy away from overtly political material. “I’ve never been political. I recently tried to do a bit about the Middle East, but people didn’t like it. Ultimately, I’m just doing some jokes,” he says.

“Comedy has become so big now that journalists ask for my opinion on the economy. I tell them, ‘I’m just a stand-up comedian. I’ve no bloody idea!’ I get tweeted by people saying, ‘Please, please, do a routine about Libya’. But they’re asking the wrong person. People overrate comedians. Much as I’d like to sort it out for them, I’m afraid I can’t. I half expect people to hand me Gaddafi’s phone number and say, ‘Have a word, Alan!’”

Alan Carr stands out from the snide, clever-clever breed of comedian now cluttering up the circuit. “I’d love to be one of those comics, but I’m not,” he says. “My audience want something else from me: warmth and funny stories. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

“There’s snobbery in the broadsheets sometimes about comedy. The critics write these incredible reviews: ‘I didn’t laugh once, but what an amazing take on tugboats. Five stars’. It winds me up when people try to be clever for its own sake.”

Alan recalls watching a documentary on Cary Grant that prompted him to draw parallels with his own role as a performer.

“Some contributors were saying, ‘Cary was the most unsophisticated man in the world. He never knew what wine to order. He was not good with the ladies’. But so what? He picked his roles because he knew people wanted to see him as Cary Grant. Perhaps I’m comedy’s answer to Cary Grant. Give’em what they want! Why not?” As he psyches himself for the tour ahead and his first appearance in York since October 2007, Alan can reflect on the progress he has made in the meantime.

“Things just keep getting better and better for me,” he says. “I was on holiday recently, and I picked up a magazine about house renovations. The first article I turned to had the headline: ‘Make your bedroom as camp as Alan Carr’. It’s funny when people mention your name and everyone knows what they’re talking about. It’s great when you become a byword for something.”

• Tickets for Alan Carr’s Work-In-Progress show on September 5 cost £28.50 on 0844 871 3024 or grandoperahouseyork.org.uk

Alan Carr: Spexy Beast will be released on DVD by Universal Pictures (UK) in November.