ROMESH Ranganathan does not skirt hard questions in his first solo show, the aptly named Irrational. Is he right? Is he the only one in the world to have got the wrong end of the stick?

“The show is about my viewpoints on things and I’m working out whether I’m being irrational or whether I’m the only one that’s got it right,” he says. “I talk about Gogglebox being a sign of the end of days, though its popularity suggests that I’m wrong and everyone else is right. But the idea that people are entertaining when they watch television is a fallacy. They need to set up a camera in my room and watch a chubby man vegetating in silence.”

Any comic who is on tour for half a year has a couple of choices with their show: maintain it as a fixed and finely tuned beast with not a single word being changed or play around with the script. Romesh likes to play. “For your own interest and to feel proud of the show, you have to keep it as up-to-date in terms of your thought process as you can. Not that I disagree with them now but there are things I have said in previous shows that aren’t interesting to me now; you want to keep it as fresh as possible so that you’re delivering it in the moment.”

The seeds for Romesh’s success were arguably planted a long time ago. “When I was growing up, I became obsessed with stand-up and comedy in general. My dad was very into comedy, so I grew up loving it to the point that we went to Pontins holiday camp when I was nine or 10 and I entered a talent competition doing stand-up. I memorised jokes that I’d read in a joke book and delivered them in a Sri Lankan accent. It was quite a niche act.

“But as I got older I never thought of it as a career path and when I was teaching I just thought I’d give it a go.”

His job as a maths teacher clearly helped him work a crowd, but it was a concern that he’d regret it if he didn’t at least try his hand at stand-up that pushed him to take his comedic talents on to the stage. “I’m embarrassed to say it, but I thought it would be easy. So I booked this gig, wrote my set and looked forward to accepting the plaudits. Obviously I really tanked. But I still enjoyed it and kept doing loads of open spots and then I got to the final of So You Think You’re Funny in 2010. In the semi-final, one of the judges, Dan Antopolski told me, ‘We saw you go on and thought this guy is definitely going to be a comic’. That inspired me and it went from there.”

Given his possession of a mathematical brain, Romesh’s comedy preparation probably contains lots of graphs and arrows and laughter pie-charts, right? Well, no not really. “There was a running joke that I wasn’t the best one out of the maths teachers,” he says. “I will sit down and think ‘OK, I’m writing now’, but what I tend not to do is word exactly what I’m going to say. I’ll map out what the ideas are and what I think is interesting and then I’ll talk about it and hope that funny will arrive. Sometimes it doesn’t but I find that if you’re restricted by your lines then you won’t ever try something different; a lot of the time, you write on stage when you explore an idea and they laugh.”

Romesh Ranganathan will be at the Arts Centre on March 24. To book go to swindontheatres.co.uk or call 01793 524481.