Comic Ed Byrne talks about his forthcoming shows in Wolverhampton and Stafford

In fact, his love of natural history has crossed into television with appearances on The One Show, Countryfile and presenting items on Volcano Live. He is also co-host of the highly acclaimed Dara & Ed’s Big Adventure and follow up Dara & Ed’s Road To Mandalay, both on BBC Two.

He’s back on the road with another touring show that reaches Wolverhampton’s Wulfrun Hall tomorrow before returning to Stafford Gatehouse on January 26, Birmingham Town Hall on January 27, and Lichfield Garrick on April 24.

The Irish comic is firmly of a belief that the current breed of parents spoil their kids rotten. Whether it’s to do with the ever-increasing size of garden trampolines, or his own kids’ demand for elderflower cordial.

“My dad wasn’t a bad dad, he was just a 1970s dad. I could never see my children ever again from this moment on, and I’ve already done more parenting then he did in my entire life. But, of course, I made a conscious decision that I was going to be an awesome dad. My wife will come back with tales from her friends of how awful their husbands are and she’ll see me smiling and say ‘alright, stop congratulating yourself just because such and such can’t be left alone with their children for two minutes’.”

In his new touring show, the perfectly-titled Spoiler Alert, Ed compares and contrasts the old-school child-rearing days with 21st century methods and suggests that there are different ways to learn how to be a mum or dad. “I grew up in what I would call an aspirational household in that my parents bettered themselves over the course of my childhood. My mother was a radiographer and ended up a lecturer in radiography, while my dad was a sheet metal worker and went up to a supervisory role. I’d still say that you are expected to do a lot more parenting than our parents did and that’s a weird thing because you tend to think that your parents are where you learned parenting from. But you don’t, really, it’s more that you look around you to see what’s going on with other parents.”

For the show Ed extends his analysis on the culture of entitlement to look at areas where we could perhaps do with being spoiled a little bit more. “Where I think we’re not acting spoiled enough is in the political arena. We have a tendency to accept what’s happening and that’s where we should be acting more entitled: we are entitled to the government we want. We’re spoiled in all these little ways, but not spoiled enough.”

As well as stories about his two young sons, Ed weaves in routines about running out of petrol in the most awkward place imaginable, helping rescue an injured man in the Cairngorms, and the nation-dividing campaign and result of the EU referendum. His way of tackling Brexit is to draw an analogy with the time his son was determined to touch an electric fence with his dad trying to warn him of the dangers.

“I was telling the story of the electric fence for a while, and then suddenly it struck me that it was Brexit in microcosm. I don’t want to alienate half of the population or maybe a third of my audience, but it works as an analogy whichever side you’re on.”

Spoiler Alert also continues a theme that he’s tackled in previous shows, that of his gradual shift from being a working-class Dubliner to a fully paid-up rural-residing member of the middle classes.