When Noel Fielding brings his stand-up tour to south London next month, it will be a long overdue homecoming.

The 42-year-old comedian’s An Evening with Noel Fielding comes to Bromley’s Churchill Theatre on November 18, New Wimbledon Theatre on November 19 and Croydon’s Fairfield Halls on November 20.

Noel told Vibe: “That’s where I grew up, that’s my neck of the woods.

“I’m looking forward to Croydon because I did art at Croydon College, which is next to Fairfield Halls.

“I can’t remember what Fairfield Halls is like as a gig venue – I think we did it on the first Boosh tour. It’s a bit like a big library, a big wooden ship.

“I saw Eddie Izzard there when I was at college and Rob Newman and David Baddiel. I definitely saw some quite good people there – Vic and Bob, maybe.”

He added: “I liked growing up around there. I grew up around Mitcham, it was very green and there was a common around there and we used to come into Croydon for the cinema and stuff.

“Bromley, I used to go quite a lot because my cousin lived there.”

After the massive success of the Mighty Boosh – both on TV and tour – and then the high profile telly gigs with Never Mind the Buzzcocks and the divisive Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, Noel is looking forward to getting back in front of a live audience.

He said: “Now I’m interested in other things. It’s nice to do lots of different stuff so I think I was desperate and hungry to do something live. I really just wanted to get back to hearing an audience laugh doing stand-up again.

“That’s how you start when you’re a comedian and it’s so basic and pure. You just say something and it’s either funny or it’s not.”

The former Mighty Boosh star’s tour may have a prosaic title but that’s the only thing that’s likely to be straightforward about it: expect stand-up, sketches, surreal characters, music and animation. Noel said he wrote the show in eight months.

“I had most of the ideas already,” he said. “Mainly because of fear. You just go ‘oh my god, I’ve got to play Hammersmith Apollo or wherever, I can’t be bad’.

“It’s just pure fear. You stop sleeping about three months before you do it, thinking ‘I’ve got to write another joke, I’ve got to write another joke’. It’s horrifying.”

Noel’s obsession with getting it right appears to have paid off, with the show getting a great reaction when it first toured the UK last year and then Australia and New Zealand.

Given the fanatical following of his early work, you would expect it to be lapped up by fans but Noel is proud of its broad appeal.

He said: “We knew we had a lot of stuff, but we managed to appeal to lots of different people by doing lots of different things.

“Also, the idea was that you didn’t have to have seen anything else I’ve done to enjoy the show. That was the rule, really, you couldn’t have anything that’s just for fans. It had to work for a broader audience.”

Noel added: “Sometimes the most unlikely person will stop me in the street, a strange Rastafarian traffic warden will stop me and say ‘do you do that fly thing, where you pretend to be a fly?’ And I say ‘yeah’ and they say ‘I f*****g love that’.

“Or an 80-year-old butcher. I love it when it’s people that are unexpected.”

Maybe one of the most unexpected early fans was one of Noel’s idols.

He said: “On the first Boosh tour in Wimbledon, Paul Weller came along just for a LOL. I remember feeling really scared.

“When I was 17 or 18, I was a mod and it blew my mind that Paul Weller was going to come.

“He said in Time Out once that he liked my stand-up.

“It was one of the most surreal things ever because I hadn’t been going long.

“It was the first time anyone had ever name-checked me in print and I just went ‘Oh my god, is that real?’ I was so happy for about a week.”

An Evening with Noel Fielding is at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre on November 18, New Wimbledon Theatre on November 19 and Croydon’s Fairfield Halls on November 20. It is released on Universal DVD on November 16. Go to atgtickets.com/bromley. atgtickets.com/wimbledon or www.fairfield.co.uk