Russell Hicks: This Time It's Personal comes to York and Leeds with tales of US comedian's 'strange' experiences

“It was skateboards and sunshine and all that stuff that you equate with California. Roller blades, sunglasses. Living in the 90s, Bill Clinton was president. We thought things would be great forever...”

However, he was an Anglophile, so when he arrived in the UK years later, he had a list of must-see locations.

"I was honestly excited to go to Slough when I got here,” he says.

Readers might have guessed the reason being that he was a fan of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s original series of The Office, which was set in the Berkshire town and aired on the BBC from 2001 to 2003.

Russell, 42, says: “In the early 2000s, way before I was a comic, I worked in a really bad call centre. My friend, his parents were from Liverpool, and I remember he had the Office DVDs. He was like: ‘Oh, my parents are into this, let's watch it’. It blew my mind. I used to watch the Office on my lunch break at a job that was exactly like that (show).”

Turning up each day to work a job he didn’t like was a turning point and, aged 26, he made a list of all the things he wanted to do in life – and comedy was one.

“It was January 10 and I just tried it. I tell people with comedy, if you think you can do it and you want to give it a go, go do it, because if you take to it and you are natural at it, it'll change your life.

"Within three years of trying stand-up comedy, my life had completely altered. I was living in a different city. I was immersed in a totally new reality. And within five years, I was on another continent.”

He has now been living in the UK for almost 12 years.

“It was so much more exciting to me,” he says. “I was always very into the idea of going to Europe.

"I was a bit of a Romantic and I used to read Hemingway and all these authors that left America, and I was like, yeah I want to be like that one day. So I think it just kind of played into that vision, and so I just stayed here.”

He adds: “Britain is kinder to the arts in the sense that they sort of value talent more than they value just prestige.

"In America, it's all about how famous you are, how much television have you been on? Whereas in Britain, I feel like there's much more of a circuit for journeyman troubadours to ply their wares.”

Now based in Hertfordshire, he is setting out on his latest tour, Russell Hicks: This Time It’s Personal. It comes to The Wardrobe in Leeds on Sunday, February 22 (an earlier show at the Foundry, Sheffield, booked for tomorrow night has been cancelled).

Whereas he has previously delivered improvised comedy and fish-out-of-water routines, the new show is about what it's like to be a comic, including some of the strange experiences he’s had, such as performing on a cruise ship.

Like most comedians, Russell has to use social media to promote his work and some of them have gone viral, particularly his ‘Dear Diary’ segments which dissect what it’s like to be an American in England.

Coming from abroad, it’s easy to notice differences between the North and South.

He says: "I love the North. It's got a different flavour, obviously, than what you get in the south, and I just find that northern crowds are a bit more up for the interaction and they like to get involved. I mean, people in the North, they've just developed funny, they've got a wit about them and I think it can make for a pretty cracking show.”

He is a long way from home and, looking out of their window this winter, people might wonder why he would want to leave the beaches of California – where he spent his formative years playing in punk bands like Rich White Males – for these inclement isles.

But he says: “I didn't live right on the coast, I lived kind of inland. And anywhere in America, the more inland you go, it just all becomes Texas eventually. Everywhere you go, if you just leave the beach, it all becomes a bit provincial and a little aggressive and a little closed-minded.

"I would say that's kind of where I grew up in California, a little provincial town that I had to get out of as fast as possible.

"And weirdly, I realised that I always equated success with (being) as far away as I could get geographically from where I grew up. Literally, I was like, ‘I want to get as far from here as I can’, and I think that was another thing that drew me to Britain.”

Elsewhere, Russell, who previously compered the comedy stage at Leeds Festival, has appeared on shows such as Have I Got News For You and the Last Leg, and has taken up a number of acting roles, being cast on Prime Video series Lovestruck High. He has also been the voiceover artist for Sky Comedy.

Last year, he had a small role as ‘Warm Up Guy’ in the Edgar Wright film The Running Man – a pretty good gig for an Anglophile, given the director’s previous credits, including Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, were big moments in British culture.

Russell says: “I met Glen (Powell, the lead actor), I met Edgar and I met Colman Domingo right out the gate and it was just amazing. They brought me in for like two weeks, I was every day going into Warner Brothers.

"I always go back to when I was in my 20s and I was working in an office, and thought, ‘I don't know, man, I'm gonna kill myself, I'll just try stand-up comedy and see what happens’. And then I'm like: you're sitting in a trailer right now on the set of an Edgar Wright movie. This is nuts, man.”

Russell Hicks: This Time It’s Personal is at Theatre At 41, York, on Saturday, February 14 and The Wardrobe, Leeds, on Sunday, February 22. www.russellhicks.co.uk