JENNY Eclair has just turned 56 and is midway through her 50-date How To Be A Middle Aged Woman (Without Going Insane) tour and preparing for her next gig, Grumpy Old Women, with a cough she can’t shake. But don’t expect her to put her feet up with a hot honey and lemon and an adult colouring book when she comes off stage. She’s not a fan of the craze.

“I’d rather take HRT personally,” quips the comedian, who posts pictures of her watercolours on her candid blog. “It’s basically saying, ‘I have no imagination whatsoever’. It’s a bit like tracing – that’ll be the next big thing. Let’s face it, it’s f**king weird!”

Colouring books dispatched with, it’s on to something else that’s been bothering Eclair - her health.

She was recently diagnosed with high blood pressure, after suspecting she might have it for a while.

“I should have been more sensible and tried to do something about my lifestyle 10 years ago, but, of course, I was just too busy having a great time to worry about blood pressure,” says Eclair, who, in 1995, was the first woman to win the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award.

“A lot of things catch up with you in your 50s and, all of a sudden, you’re a bit frumpy, you’re a bit gouty, you’re a bit acid refluxy. This puts me in a sort of amber light area of other dangers from high blood pressure, like heart attack.”

Thankfully Eclair says she doesn’t suffer from any other health problems and tries to stay as fit as she can. She does Pilates and goes to the gym “under the supervision of my 27-year-old daughter, who makes me do 15 minutes or 20 minutes on three different machines”.

Phoebe Eclair-Powell, Eclair’s daughter with her long-term partner Geof Powell, is a playwright and recently moved out of the family home in London.

“It’s very difficult to let go of the things that you like, and I’m not very good with change,” admits the comic, whose most recent novel, Moving, came out last year. “I do struggle with people moving out, I do struggle with my mother having to move from her cottage to a flat, even though the flat has got this fabulous view and she’s really very lucky.”

Jenny credits her stoical parents with keeping her relatively sane. When she was in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! in 2010 (she came third), she realised “all the people who were totally off their trolleys in the jungle came from f****d-up backgrounds”.

“I learned that I was very, very lucky with my family because I didn’t have mental parents. I had parents who were actually very good to me.”

Her own style of mothering is very different from her mum’s, however.

“I have gone totally the other way and spoiled and smothered. I still check she’s breathing at night time,” she jokes.

“My mother’s very stoic. I have a line in my show where I say, ‘Last time I stayed with my mother, by the time I managed to get up, she’d already made soup and been to a funeral’. Whereas I’m a woman in hysterics, clinging to my daughter., saying, ‘Can I come too?’ ‘What time are you going to be home?’ ‘Will you ring me when you’re on the night bus?’”

Grumpy Old Women, which also stars Susie Blake and Kate Robbins, appears at the Wyvern on May 18. To book visit swindontheatres.co.uk or call 01793 524481.