MARION SAUVEBOIS meets comedian Lloyd Langford

WHEN Lloyd Langford comes to the Arts Centre tonight on his 2015 Old Fashioned tour, expect soup-inspired fun and other similarly bonkers gems.

“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,” said the Welsh stand-up.

“I’m one of those people who is bewildered by choice: I’d much rather have just one or two choices. 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.”

He intends 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.”

Since he last toured, his profile has risen thanks to increased exposure on TV. It’s also been a chance to hang out with an old pal.

“It's been a lot of fun working with Rhod Gilbert on the last series of Never Mind The Buzzcocks. I think my highlight was creating the excerpts from the erotic novel that were read out by the guests.

“You end up doing some strange things in this job, but I never thought I’d end up writing sex scenes for Lethal Bizzle and Sarah Millican.

“I was on the L series of QI but with a name like Lloyd Langford, I suppose they had to book me. I might change my name to Emma Emmental to try and get on the next one.”