Mark Watson is not here - yet!

When there's the chance you might not be allowed to enter the country at the other end and it happens to perhaps the most fretful stand-up comedian on the planet - you have the recipe for another great show.

In I’m Not Here, Mark Watson has taken the seemingly minor problem of a tear in his passport photo as the starting point of the show, which spirals into an examination of identity in the digital age and a search for meaning in our lives.

“It doesn’t take much of an incident to make me get an hour of nonsense out there," he says.

"I’ve found an existential jumping-off point from almost anything that happens in life. The show is structured around this journey to Australia where I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be allowed in at the other end because of a passport issue. The guy at Heathrow said ‘we can let you on the plane but it will be at their discretion whether or not they let you in’. The passport was totally valid but it had a tiny rip in the photo page, and this would technically render it invalid.”

As well as providing Mark with a familiar feeling of neurosis, albeit one spread over a solid 24-hour timeframe, it got him pondering on what this meant in terms of who and what we are as 21st century human beings.

“I started thinking about how we have fewer and fewer physical proof of our identity," he adds. "In the old days you wouldn’t have had a problem with this scenario as you’d have a plane ticket and dozens of forms of identity. The show has become about the shift from the physical to the virtual and the fact that more and more of the objects that we used to depend on have been replaced by ideas of objects.”

This does sound like a terrifying prospect, but it all plays into Mark’s hands to produce another thoughtful, personal and downright hilarious chunk of stand-up. “My general wish for this show is for it to be quite confessional in style," Marks explains. "I’m starting to venture more into that territory. I’ve always had a lot of personal anecdotes, but it’s all generally been quite light. I think I’m gradually trying to tweak things towards darkness. I saw the last show as one-off confessional territory but I’m quite likely to talk about all that again this time. I tend not to regard some subjects as off-limits these days, and I’ve probably got more confidence that the audience are more interested in hearing what I want to talk about rather than me desperately trying to think about what’s funny and going with that.

"Having said that I’ve always tried to maintain that no matter how serious the territory you get into, the obligation is to try and get a lot of laughs.”

Much like Rob Newman and Mark Thomas do with their comedy, Mark likes to use serious and deep issues as a springboard for his gags, although he stresses it is the comedy that is the most important thing.

He says: “The thing about comedy is it gives you an opportunity to talk about this kind of stuff, but in a funny way.

“I like to use the serious issues as a hook to make people laugh – after all that is my job, to make people laugh, but if people go away also thinking about the environment or some other issue then that’s good too.”

Even when he’s offering a relatively straightforward stand-up show, Mark will always throw in something a little off-kilter.

In Flaws, he recreated the sound and fury of a children’s party he had attended (with the added terror of balloons being burst all around him), and he’s looking to insert something similar to break up the one-man-with-a-mic flow.

“I do like to seriously disrupt proceedings," he says. "I’ve always thought that an hour of someone just talking has its downsides, so my tactic is to get it far enough in that the audience do think it’s just going to be an hour of someone talking, but then do something really weird. It can backfire, though, because that thing with the kids party was fun for a bit. But then on tour, you’re doing it another 60 times with my crew having to blow up balloons and the routine ending with my nightmare of having them explode all around me. It’s all very well saying I am doing it to release this tension from my system, but it didn’t do anything of the sort; it just made me dread that moment more as every day went by. I can say with certainty that there will be no balloons this time.”

He’s also keen to limit the amount of technology he uses on stage for I’m Not Here, having utilised screens in several of his shows.

Mark adds: “I have used it a lot but I still have quite a fractious relationship with computers though I’m genuinely still impressed by the stuff that people can come up; the best relationship is to try to take the good out of it while admitting that it’s all quite frightening. Shows now have become so familiar with the sight of someone involving technology in some way, and if you have a friend like Alex Horne who basically thinks in PowerPoint, it’s quite a high benchmark. The level of some people’s shows which are so vulnerable to a malfunction would just terrify me.”

Mark Watson gives off the feeling that having nothing on his plate would be equally as terrifying. As well as the stand-up shows, he has a number of novels to his name, the latest of which is a murder mystery set in Dubai, which comes out this summer.

"I've been there quite a few times now," he reveals, "and I've always thought it was a pretty weird but fascinating place. The kind of place where it would be good to set a murder mystery."

But for now he's looking forward to the forthcoming tour and a return to the Colchester Arts Centre.

"My wife is from the area so I know it quite well," he says. "Virtually every tour goes to Colchester and I love the eccentric space of performing in a church. It creates a really great connection with the audience. Right up in their grill, which I love."

Mark Watson

Colchester Arts Centre,

Church Street, Colchester.

April 21. Doors 7.30pm, show starts 8pm.

£17, £15 concessions. 01206 500900.

www.colchesterartscentre.com

Mark Watson first came to attention when he was nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2005 Perrier Awards at the Edinburgh Festival, before being awarded the if.comedy Panel Prize the following year.

Over the years he has won best show at the Adelaide and Sydney Comedy Festivals, completed a 100-date tours of the UK, Australia and New Zealand, trained as a climate change lecturer under Al Gore, performed a 24-hour show and published numerous books including Crap At the Environment, as well as novels Hotel Alpha, Bullet Points and The Knot.

On television he has been a regular on BBC2’s Mock the Week, Nevermind the Buzzcocks and Time Trumpet, and had a hugely-acclaimed Radio 4 series, Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better.

He has also performed stand-up on BBC 1’s Live At The Apollo, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and Channel 4’s Comedy Gala.

But perhaps his greatest achievement (in his words) was being given the prestigious task of hosting the NME Awards at the Brixton Academy, following in the footsteps of the likes of Russell Brand, Zane Lowe and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and where he got to introduce former Colchester schoolboys Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon for a special Blur reunion set.