I think it’s possible that Michael McIntyre hates me. Five minutes into the interview, he says: “No, I want to talk about you, Stephen Armstrong.” And he explains, in quite some detail, how aggrieved he still feels that when he was a young, struggling stand-up, selling his wares in tiny attic rooms during the Edinburgh Festival, he was passed over by critics and the Perrier panel. “Edinburgh can give you a leg-up, and Edinburgh didn’t give me a leg-up,” he says with a half smile, looking me firmly in the eyes. “You were intrinsically involved in that.” Me?

“Well, everybody who’s running that award and who’s responsible for picking that list, and anyone reviewing.” He looks down at the tablecloth and picks at it briefly. “I don’t know what those people are supposed to be doing, to be honest. Are they looking for stars?”

But Michael, I say, feeling slightly nonplussed, does it matter? Look at you. You’re 33 years old, you’ve sold out the O2 Arena for four nights and toured to half a million-plus people. You have your own primetime BBC1 show. Your previous DVD is the fastest-selling stand-up disc ever. You really didn’t need the Perrier award.

“I’m not just talking about being nominated.” He’s speaking faster now. “I’m talking about being ignored and not thought of in any way, in any high regard. I knew for a while, because people used to come to my show and love it, and it surprised me that critics were coming and not seeing that. A lot of those jokes that I put out on my first DVD, some of those routines — especially the Scottish stuff — came from Edinburgh. I was killing in those rooms and it was extremely tough for me to get nothing out of it. That went on for four or five years of doing Edinburgh.”

He changes gear: “And this is what I find weird about other comedians, when I hear that they have been less than complimentary about me, because I’ve done their game. I haven’t just shown up fully formed. I did my time. I did more than my time. I’ve hosted Late’n’Live, and I’ve done Jongleurs. It wasn’t just...” He pauses for a long time. “It was everyone in comedy. I was really making no impact for a long time. It was really confusing and hard, really hard, just to keep going. Then doing it became a lot better, and I was getting a reaction, encores and standing ovations in Edinburgh, going to the big rooms and tearing them apart. And not. Getting. Noticed. At. All. Not even getting invited to festivals. It was odd.” Then he shakes his head. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it any more.” But he returns to this theme again and again during the interview — that he worked so damn hard and spent so many years being ignored, and he just can’t understand why.

His worrying and worrying at this particular scar doesn’t seem to make sense. Shortly after the interview, I went to one of his O2 gigs — a single night on a 54-date arena tour that plays Wembley four nights in a row, Manchester MEN Arena two nights in a row, Glasgow SECC three nights, Sheffield Hallam Arena three nights,

Cardiff four nights, Nottingham three nights, Bournemouth six nights, and on and on and on. The O2 tickets went on sale for £30, but were changing hands on eBay for upwards of £100. People bid less for Beyoncé.

Sitting towards the front in the cavernous space, I slowly realised that most of the people nearby had never been to a comedy gig before. This was their first. When McIntyre walked on, women ran to the front, shooting footage on their mobiles and smiling up at him. Short of throwing their knickers on stage, it’s hard to see how much closer they’d get to groupies.

This was adulation, pure and simple. And yet: “I keep thinking, ‘Hey, these people have waited six months, they’ve bought my tickets, they’re my biggest fans.’ But an audience, after the initial big welcome, has to be won all over again,” he explains quietly. “Nobody is going to laugh harder at your joke just because they liked your old jokes. The only thing I’m focused on is the sound of the welcome, compared to the applause at the end. I need the end to be as good as, or better than, the beginning. You come on and people go nuts; you leave and they go, ‘Okay, great.’ Even the interval is torture. At the start of the show, it’s ‘Please welcome Michael McIntyre’, and there’s a big round of applause. You go off for the interval, then it’s, ‘Please welcome back...’” He pauses. “And if there’s no whistles in that applause, then I’m on the way down.”

It’s as if he can’t really believe that the past two years have happened; that he’s stuck back in 2005, playing the circuit and the festivals, watching his debts build up and his life slip by. He’s sure disaster is just seconds away all the time. Ratings, for instance, genuinely terrify him.

“You get a text the following morning,” he says. “The text comes and it’s your life, and you have no idea what the numbers are going to say. It could say anything.”

Over the summer, his own series — Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow — launched on BBC1. He hosted and introduced other stand-ups. It was a huge hit, with 6m viewers. But once a week he got that ratings text, and once a week he was a wrung-out insomniac.

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