Comic Stephen Merchant is hoping his latest tour could lead to a love match, he tells Roz Laws.

In an open invitation to the women of Britain, Stephen Merchant has called his first stand-up comedy tour Hello Ladies.

In his deadpan style, he comments that he’s looking forward to travelling the country to meet his fans – “and making at least one of them my wife”.

So just how determined is he to find a partner? He is 36 and single, after all.

“I’m not 100 per cent serious,” admits Merchant, the writer/director who created hit TV series The Office and Extras with Ricky Gervais.

“The show is a dissection of where I’ve gone wrong in the past with women. It’s not an appealing portrait of myself.

“If someone arrived at a gig with the aim of becoming my wife, they’d soon be sneaking out, having been put off.

“It’s always been one of the funniest aspects of life, this search for a mate, especially if you are being brutally honest. Everyone understands the emotion and there’s a natural voyeurism about it.

“Sometimes it’s the 21-year-old me talking on stage. And I magnify elements of myself to make them grotesque. It’s really not attractive!

“But do I want to settle down? Of course, no-one wants to die alone. But I’m lucky to spend so much of my life doing things that I enjoy. I’m not complaining and I’m not lying awake at night worrying about my single status.”

The Hello Ladies tour sees Merchant return to his roots, as he was a stand-up comic before meeting Gervais and going into radio and television.

He had his first comedy gig in a room above a Bristol pub in 1997, 18 months after he was due to kick-start his career while a Midland student.

He studied film and literature at Warwick University, partly choosing it because of its student radio station. He had a weekly slot on W963, broadcasting to the campus and a handful of people in Leamington Spa.

“I wanted to be a DJ because I thought it would be a really good job. You’d only have to work for a couple of hours a day, and the rest of the time you could sit in your pants watching TV.

“I was interested in comedy too, and I psyched myself up to do my first stand-up gig at Warwick Arts Centre, but then they called the show off.

“I went another 18 months before I was ready to try again, and by then I was back home in Bristol.”

That was just before he applied to the new Xfm radio station in London, where he became Ricky Gervais’s assistant. After six months he left to start a two-year traineeship as a BBC producer, which included a stint in Birmingham.

“I worked on a programme based at Pebble Mill, the Really Useful Show,” he remembers, and not especially fondly.

“It was lonely, I didn’t know anybody and I was terrible at the job. I didn’t know what I was doing and the whole thing was a shambles.

“I learned that I shouldn’t have that sort of role. I need people around me to fill in the blanks.

“I lived in a flat near Pebble Mill for a couple of months which was brutally cold. I used to phone Ricky up, and it seemed like he was boating on Regent’s Park lake while I was shivering in Birmingham!

“I dragged my mattress into the lounge so I could sleep by the three-bar fire. It was like something out of Dickens.”

Now Merchant is returning to his old haunts in Birmingham and Warwick Arts Centre, plus Wolverhampton, on his extensive tour which keeps him busy almost every night until Christmas.