January 2007. I walked from the stage, through the applause of about 80 people sitting around tables, and back into the quiet dressing room, job done. Fifteen minutes of previously untried stand-up comedy performed in a subterranean comedy club in West London, and about 12 minutes of it got laughs. I felt good. Doing new stuff is like stepping into complete darkness. It might be funny; might become a mainstay of your act that people will quote back to you in 20 years’ time: “I love that one you did about…” Or it might only ever get one miserable outing: stillborn and discarded.

This club used to be a gentlemen’s toilet. In fact, the actual gentlemen’s toilet where Wilfrid Brambell, who played old man Steptoe in the classic BBC sitcom, Steptoe and Son, was once arrested and charged with trying to procure a sexual partner. There was no blue plaque, but I liked the idea of it; the sense that a little bit of unorthodox British comedy history had happened here.

Later, when I got home, I’d sit with my set-list, as I did after every one of these try-out gigs, ticking, crossing, and question-marking each gag according to audience response; making notes on my delivery, earmarking any necessary rewrites and adding improvised bits from that night’s performance that had got good laughs and thus earned the right to stay in the act. I was already beginning mentally to pull apart this night’s routine when a female comic, who’d been on earlier in the evening, walked into the dressing room. “I didn’t want to say anything before you went on,” she said, “but, well, you’re a hero of mine; one of the reasons I went into comedy.” I thanked her politely. She blushed. I hugged her in a comedy elder statesman kind of way; very different from the way I used to embrace women after gigs. Times had changed. My last live stand-up show had been ten years earlier, to 5,500 people in a massive marquee within the walls of Battersea power station. Now, aged 50, I was back in the saddle, doing little clubs like this, trying out new material, preparing for a national tour later in the year.

“It’s so great to meet you,” she continued, “and I’m so glad you’re nice because I’d heard that you weren’t.” It was the kind of compliment you feel you want to workshop a little. I opted, instead, for a warm smile.

Encounters like this were an interesting and largely unanticipated part of the return-to-live-stand-up experience: finding out how the new comics, those brave and battered foot soldiers of the club circuit, would respond to me, that guy off the telly who’d done the big tours and sold the DVDs (well, videos to be precise); that guy who used to be funny but has probably gone a bit soft; lost his edge doing too many chat shows and red-carpet rent-a-quotes. But was that just me imposing hostility on them, putting sceptical words in their mouths? Here, after all, was a new comic who seemed to be genuinely happy to see me back with a microphone in my hand; to see my grey hairs glinting under the spotlight.

She continued, “Whenever I die” – a phrase you only ever hear in comedy dressing rooms and Buddhist meetings – “I think of you dying at the Royal Variety Performance, and that always cheers me up.” Truly, I had become an inspirational figure.

Another young comic, two weeks later, who’d gone on just before me and, in truth, gone rather better – new material is a great leveller – told me how he was a big fan of mine when he was at school. Then he gave me his business card. Club comedians have definitely changed. Oh, they look the same: that homeless-post-graduate chic, usually accessorised with a dog-eared notebook and a difficult paperback novel. But if a comedian, in what I unashamedly refer to as “my day”, had offered anyone his business card, he would have been dismissed as a shallow and materialistic mercenary.

Ambition, professionalism, success: these were all frowned upon by alternative comedians, as they used to call us back in the Eighties. Some mix of socialist ideals and troubadour romance meant that we had to do comedy just for the love of it. I can recall comics who died every time I saw them. They somehow became heroic figures on the alternative circuit; free spirits unrestrained by the manacles of laughter. They marched on, happy just to be comedians, not needing to be successful ones. Consider, for example, the Ice Man. He used to wheel a massive lump of ice on stage, and then spend 20 minutes melting it with a blowtorch while talking, in a largely unremarkable way, about things that had happened to him that week. Often the audience would jeer and heckle, but the comedians, standing at the back of the club, gloried in the sheer anarchy of it.

There would be no place for the Ice Man in the modern comedy-club scene. The new kids are all, in the main, very good, very professional, and very focused. After one club gig I did recently, a lad, who looked about 17, said to me, “That was a very clever template joke you started with.” I employed my warm smile again, but had no idea what he was talking about. Someone later explained to me that it was a phrase commonly used on stand-up comedy courses, where many of these new comics learnt the theory behind the laughs. In these classes, rough edges were smoothed, stagecraft was installed, and years of struggle were downsized into months of minor discomfort. Mind you, I’d like to have seen the tutor’s face if the Ice Man had turned up.

I may sound dubious about this comedy wind-change but the truth is, the general standard of new stand-ups is considerably higher than it was when I started out. A high percentage of the current crop, even the novices doing unpaid five-minute slots, are undeniably funny and extremely polished. And there are lots of them. A promoter told me he had a database containing the names of more than 400 working comics. When I was doing the clubs, first time around, there were about 45 of us. I was in the right place at the right time. If I turned up now, as an unknown, untried comic from Birmingham, I think I might just get lost in the mix.

Of course, I’ve changed, too. Just before the show begins in a comedy club, the comics will often exchange notes to make sure they aren’t overlapping too much as far as subject areas are concerned: “Oh, well, if you’re doing your Big Brother stuff I probably won’t do mine,” that kind of thing. Sadly – I suppose I must have been a bit preoccupied – I went up to a bunch of nervous and slightly shabby-looking comedy novices, standing in the corner of a club, waiting to go on, and asked, “Is anyone doing any ‘It’s tough being a millionaire’ material?” They each shook their heads and muttered a polite “No”. That alternative comedy ethos still lingers with me, but I never allowed it to dominate my life. I wasn’t the youngest comic there, but I was definitely the richest.

So what have I been doing, returning to comedy clubs? The truth is, over the past couple of years, I’d started to become a bit jaded; a bit uninspired. I even heard myself talking about retirement. I resolved to return to the source, to rediscover that obsession that made me become a comedian in the first place, to re-access my mojo. In my gut, I’ve always felt that live stand-up was the real comedy, the trunk of the tree. Chat shows, sitcoms, funny autobiographies: they were merely branches; branches that sometimes bore beautiful fruit, but branches nevertheless. So I said yes to the national tour, to the Edinburgh Festival, to other festivals in Montreal and Toronto. Theatres were booked. Visas were applied for. Tour managers were hired. Now all I needed was an act.

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