WHEN Lloyd Langford comes to Swindon on his 2015 Old Fashioned tour, don’t expect an exhibition of comedic machismo.

The Welsh funny man, who has been successively dubbed in the press as ‘mild-mannered’, ‘softly spoken’ and ‘wise fool’, displays all the attributes of someone who wanders in and out of museums to broaden his mind.

“Out of those, I like ‘wise fool’,” he says. “I don’t really play high status on stage and that’s a conscious thing; I could never see myself as being one of those comedians who comes out on stage in a leather jacket saying how brilliant they are. I’d much rather go: ‘I don’t really understand this’.”

This naivety and wide-eyed innocence is right there in the titles of the shows he’s been performing ever since he won the Chortle Student Comic of the Year prize in 2004 including ‘Not a Lover, Not a Fighter’ and ‘Every Day I Have the Blues’. His new show cranks it up a little more with the claim that he is ‘Old Fashioned.’ “It’s about me being confused by things like Snapchat or NekNomination, and with a phenomenon like the ice bucket challenge. I’m not on Twitter and so much stuff is conducted through social network that I do miss out on certain things. But I’m quite a shy person and don’t want my life being broadcast to people. As a comedian, you get unmitigated praise or unmitigated criticism, neither of which are any use. I do think social media is good in some senses. I look at Twitter and things are happening in real time and it’s useful to get a broad range of opinion.”

As well as social media, he has plenty things to say on stage about e-cigarettes, hair conditioner, the Royal Family, cinema etiquette and soup. Yes, soup.

“My love of soup came about when I was out in Dubai doing some gigs and meals there just seemed to be an all-you-can-eat buffet. I’m one of those people who is bewildered by choice. With an all-you-can-eat buffet, that’s magnified to a thousand and I just didn’t know where to start. So I went for the old reliable of soup.”

From there he has managed to get about ten minutes’ material out of the subject which might extend depending on the level of audience engagement with the topic. “I’ve had some soup-heckling when they decided to offer up their own favourite ones. A woman in the audience said ‘tomato’ which is a bit ordinary, and so I made fun of her. She kept coming back with adjectives to make it sound more exotic, like ‘Italian’. I hit her with ‘gazpacho’, but she didn’t know what that was. I also think it’s quite funny to delve into issues that maybe other people haven’t talked about. So, people will be talking about twerking but what I’m really going to fixate on is the largely pointless thing. Like soup.”

Soup trivia aside, when Lloyd Langford comes to the Arts Centre, expect him to point out many things that you might not already know, about the town or the wider world. After all, that’s what highly talented wise fools do.

Lloyd Langford will be at Swindon Arts Centre on Thursday, February 19 at 8pm.

Tickets cost £13 or £11 for concessions.

To book call or visit 01793 524481 or visit swindontheatres.co.uk.