Comedian Ed Byrne plays Worthing

Ed returns to the road this year after a sell-out Edinburgh Fringe run with his biggest tour to date and his brand-new show Spoiler Alert.

“I originally intended to call the show I’ll Millennial You in a Minute, but my promoter considered the title off-puttingly baffling. That’s my own chainsaw in the photo, by the way...

In the show, Ed explores “the thin line between righteous complaining and brat-like whining.”

As Ed says: “Are we right to be fed up or are we spoiled?”

The show was a success in Edinburgh, the perfect starting point to turn it into something he can tour with, Ed says. And as it tours, so it expands. After Christmas, it will have expanded so much that he will lose his support act.

“The show at the end of the tour is a substantially-different animal than at the start, and usually you have the pressure of making a DVD of the show before Christmas, but it is nice not to have that this time. You usually do the DVD in October and then by the time the DVD comes out, it is a pretty different show.

“But the (bottom) has fallen out of the DVD market. DVDs have slumped hugely. Unless you are one of the top five comedians, it is just not viable to make a DVD any more. People are so used to streaming these days and looking on Netflix to see what is available. It is all very different now. I think people just expect to stream all the time. I think we are just very much a download culture now… which is maybe not as bad a thing for the comedians as it is for the musicians. These days you have got to make your money live.”

For Ed, creating a new show is on an every-other-year cycle: “I write the show for Edinburgh and then I will tour it around the UK and then I will take it to other areas the following year, so really it is just every other year I am thinking that I have got to write something… and you are thinking ‘What if I can’t’

“The worry is that the show goes on sale before you have even written it. You just assume you are going to be able to do it, and then it is a massive relief when you get to Edinburgh and you are fine. For me, it is a big relief by June if I have got 45 minutes of material because I then know that I can easily turn that into a decent hour for Edinburgh.”

The theme this year is just how spoilt we are – a theme which came about through Ed spoiling his own two kids: “It is interesting from that generational thing.”

Ed’s television credits are numerous: Mock The Week, Have I Got News For You, The Graham Norton Show, Live At The Apollo, The One Show, Comic Relief Bake Off 2015, The World’s Most Dangerous Roads and, most recently, he and Dara O Briain filmed the follow-up to their Big Adventure show for BBC2 entitled Dara and Ed’s Road to Mandalay.

Ed will be performing at the Assembly Hall Worthing on Wednesday, November 15, 8pm. Tickets on 01903 206206 and online at worthingtheatres.co.uk.