You could call it a midlife crisis, says Mark Daniels. Or you could frame it more positively and say that he is simply taking time to reflect.

Either way the show is Mark Daniels: That’s Terrifying. Can We Brunch Now?, and it is at the Chichester Fringe for a date on Wednesday, June 10 in the New Park Studio.

It's all part of Mark’s comeback to comedy.

“Strangely enough I used to do stand-up 12 years ago,” he says. “I did it for two or three years and then I stopped. Partly it's because I was busy in my personal life and it was difficult to find the time but I also had a bit of a confidence wobble. I was doing quite well and getting into bigger clubs and I was finding that the clubs were a bit more masculine and a bit more rowdy and it didn't feel like they were particularly interested in my kind of comedy. I needed people who were going to listen. That’s my memory of more than ten years ago. It just somehow did not feel right and I just had a bit of a confidence wobble about where my career was going.

“But now I am older and wiser. I think you care less when you're older if something goes wrong and I think maybe you are just less affected by people and how they react. But also I think social media has become much more prevalent in those ten years and I think I was seeing other ways of doing comedy. There are lots more opportunities that are opening up. But also I was getting a bit jealous seeing people that I was just as good as or if not better than back then and now they're on TV. So it's great to get back to it. It was not a confidence wobble about whether I was funny or not. It was much more about where my career was going.”

Looking back at that first stint in comedy, Mark’s proudest moment was an one-hour show he did at the Brighton Fringe in 2015, and in a way that has been the inspiration this time round, another one-hour show which he has honed.

“I came back to comedy about 18 months ago, about October or November 2024. It just felt like it was unfinished business. That was the exact phrase for it. I knew I had a niggle that would niggle away at me forever if I didn't bite the bullet and get back to it. The first few gigs I felt brand new again but then some kind of muscle memory stepped in and I realised that I still had that skill set. I knew I could write. I'd been writing consistently in the meantime. I was not nervous about the content but I did wonder whether I still had what it took to react on stage to the audience but I did it and I discovered that I did still have that. I had people coming up to me, when I came back to it, saying where I had been all that time and why hadn't they seen me. I think the fact is that I didn't feel like I was completely new.”

As for the show: “It is about becoming a certain age. I will be 40 next year and I look at the world and I think that I should be understanding the bigger issues. There are huge shifts. This country is shifting significantly but it still feels overwhelming to me, but I just feel that I am at a kind of age where I don't have any excuse not to understand it. I'm nearly 40. When am I actually going to understand it? I don't know. I read an article saying that 81 per cent of millennials say that they can't afford a midlife crisis. I feel like I'm having one on a budget. I am this age now and I've only got a certain amount of time left and I want to understand. You could call it a crisis or you could just frame the whole thing more positively and call it a time for reflection!”