THE BLISSFUL optimism of old has been crushed by the relentless march of modern science, so Robert Newman felt duty-bound, as you do, to restore hope to the human species through the medium of comedy.

But it’s not all a joke and his latest tour, The Brain Show, is based on cold hard facts. He has dog-eared neuroscience volumes and a library card to prove it; he has even made it to page 4 of many a treatise, he volunteers playfully.

Of course, he would not go about advertising himself as a stand-up if he didn’t happily throw in a few gimmicks not to mention an MRI hat recording his own brain activity on stage. Unfortunately he won’t be able to carry his full-scale “skull xylophone” on the train – blame First Great Western for puny luggage racks.

“I did a lot of research, reading lots of unreadable books on neurology, partly because it’s easier than writing a show,” he quips. “I got overwhelmed by the intensity of my ignorance about everything. You get to page three and you’ve not understood anything. I thought to myself, maybe I’ll get lucky on page four. You never know when you’ll find the details out of which some comedy gold will happen. There is a comedy routine about how we can get to know the mind of spiders in the show. That’s about a very boring afternoon in the British Library spent thinking ‘Why am I reading about this Guyanan spider?”

“I also look at how Stonehenge might have been a prehistoric NHS. I would really like to just focus on one thing but I tend to sprout off in different directions. I’m a bit like a dog on a beach with all these smells and noises.”

For the most part the show asks, and tries to answer: Can brain scans read our minds? Are we our brains? How can you map the mind?

After a few years in the spotlight alongside David Baddiel on shows like the feted Mary Whitehouse Experience, Robert vanished almost overnight, returning instead to his first passion, writing.

He would pen four novels before rediscovering his comedy mojo.

“I started comedy writing sketches for radio but I was fed up of other people getting all the laughs instead of me," he says. "So I started doing gigs.

“Then I just took a sabbatical to write some books. It’s not until my last novel Trade Secret that I allowed myself to let comedy in again.”

This comeback reacquainted him with his die-hard fans (his unassuming manner and Hugh Grantesque wiles bewitched gaggles of swooning groupies back in the day).

After setting wrongs to right in The New Theory of Evolution, where he reclaimed Darwin’s theory of evolution from the claws of modern scientists who “hijacked it” turning into a “reductive ideology that left people with a pessimistic view of human nature and of society”, he decided to delve deeper in the conspiracy and focus on the universe’s biggest puzzle – the brain.

“A lot of the interpretation of science on TV and radio is a gross libel of what human beings are and what animals are. Yes we do smell, growl and snap every now and then but that’s not the whole story,” he insists.

Now 50, he finally feels he has hit his stride with a new tour and BBC Radio 4 show based on his latest book The Entirely Accurate Encyclopedia of Evolution, a wondrous A-Z of nature from altruistic amoebae and dancing squid to Richard Dawkins wrestling naked with a postal worker.

“All my life I’d write a joke and had no idea how it had happened. I thought ‘Well it’s the last one I’ll ever do because I don’t know how it’s done. But the last two shows are some of the best stuff I’ve ever done. I think you learn, to spot dead ends. I get types of laughs I couldn’t before.”

Robert Newman will be at the Arts Centre on Sunday, November 15 at 8pm. To book go to swindontheatres.co.uk or call 01793 524481.