"I've just always wanted to be a tubby little idiot on the stage" - Lloyd hits the road

“It is the most dates that I've done on a tour and I'm just really thankful to be doing it. It's all bunched up into a couple of months and it's quite rare that you do that without doing the arenas. So it's going to be pretty intense and it's just me and my tour manager, no kit so it's relatively simple but I do more than the average comic. There are songs in there. I do some singing. The show is called One Tonne of Fun and that's what it is. I've just always wanted to be a tubby little idiot on the stage and I've managed that on various different stages. I don't know why but I just always wanted to be an entertainer. I've always wanted to make people laugh. It's really old but that's how it is. I have had the idea of having this new show for quite some time. The show I did before the pandemic and during the pandemic and after the pandemic lasted three years. I started previewing at the end of 2019 and started in 2020 and eventually stopped in 2021 and this is the first one big one since so I'm hoping there won't be a pandemic.

"But obviously things are now really expensive for everyone and being a working-class lad from Grimsby I'm really conscious about that. I've always kept my ticket prices as low as I can, and you really do get whole evening’s entertainment with this. I'm not trying to throw other comics under the bus but some of them just come on and do an hour but with this it really is a proper evening of fun. I just want to throw everything at it. I can't believe that people are paying money to come and see me so I just want to give everyone the best evening I possibly can and make sure that they leave happier than they were when they started.”

Mentioning Grimsby inevitably brings to mind the Sacha Baron Cohen film – not that that is a happy association for Lloyd: “It is annoying and it is sad. I love Sacha Baron Cohen. I grew up watching all his stuff and actually I was asked to audition for the film. They were looking for an overweight Grimsby town fan in his early 30s and I thought ‘I have been training for this all my life!’ so I went for the audition but I didn't get it and I'm quite glad that I didn't. He didn't use people from Grimsby and he didn't film in Grimsby. He just wanted to take the mickey out of somewhere, and there are now quite a lot people trying to undo the bad work that he did.

“He just wanted a downtrodden working-class town and Grimsby helped because it's got the word grim in the title. He also wanted somewhere with a football club and somewhere with a port. But now we're trying to reverse what he did. I genuinely love Grimsby. I love it so much that I no longer live there but actually in truth in the business that I'm in you really do have to be in London. But I really do love Grimsby and I talk about it a lot but always in a really respectful way.”