KERRY Godliman is not the first and certainly won't be the last to ferret out the World Wide Web, combing forums for scraps of approval, enlightenment or at the very least whispers of validation for her parenting skill.

"You worry about whether you're doing thing right and where do you get your advice from? The internet. And it isn't a reliable way to get answers," deadpans the comedienne. "Or it provides too many answers. The thing about it is whether I am neurotic or capable and Mumsnet is where I go to get my answers. It's the new religion. It's awful, it feeds paranoia but then the internet feeds paranoia.

"You have to trust your own instincts and strip your life back to what is important. That's one the themes of the show: you get distracted by modern life but actually when you just calm down and look at what's important it's quite reassuring."

In her latest tour Stick Or Twist, she channels her neurosis and general state of stupefaction at the world - laying bare her tendency to dither and bewildering habits including but not limited to unintentionally hoarding her children's teeth.

"I didn’t keep them on purpose," clarifies Kerry, who splits her time between acting stints and the comedy circuit. "I just did the tooth fairy thing and threw them in a box which I then stumbled upon recently and thought, ‘What am I going to do with that?’ I mean, they’re just teeth at the bottom of a box, which is a little bit macabre and sort of voodoo. They’re quite pristine. They haven’t gone rotten which I think is a measure of my good parenting.”

Beyond this patina of blind panic and anxiety - and she is the first to admit she is “like most people” a tad irrational – she is admittedly far more serene than she once was and credits comedy for restoring a sense of control to her life that always eluded her, and still does, in her acting career.

"Comedy is very immediate," gushes Kerry, who played carer Hannah alongside Ricky Gervais in Derek and stars in Mascots, Christopher Guest’s upcoming Netflix mockumentary.

"As an actor you have to audition, then wait and see if you've got the job; and usually you don't. This gives you a lot more autonomy and power. I'm the writer, producer, and actor of my stand-up.”

She always hankered after a stand-up career, she admits. Stumped for ways to actually make it happen, she eventually set her sights on acting because "at least acting seemed to have a legitimate way of doing it". But she could never quite get comedy out of her system and after graduating from drama school enrolled in a stand-up course in London.

"Teaching someone the structure of a joke is about the most unfunny thing you can possibly imagine,” she quips. “But it was about providing people a safe environment to experiment and be creative. It made me a lot more confident about booking gigs.”

By her own admission, she simply can’t get enough of tickling the nation’s funny bone. But she has an ulterior motive for returning to the stage this time around: scouting Blighty’s shires and metropolises for a new homestead for her brood.

"The show was prompted by whether I should move out of London with my family but it opens up beyond that to why people live where they live: some people choose it, others are forced to stay where they are or forced to move. Whether I’m happy where I live is the 64 million dollar question.

"Touring is a good excuse to go around and see the country a bit, different towns and new places," she chuckles. "I'm lifestyle shopping."

So could Swindon make the shortlist?

"I'm not ruling anything out. It could well be a possibility."

Kerry Godliman appears at the Arts Centre on October 22. To book go to swindontheatres.co.uk or call 01793 524481.