Andy! We were supposed to call you 10 minutes ago. Sorry.
Yes, and I'm very, very angry about it.

You might well be. It can be hard to tell when you're proper-angry or comedy-angry. Speaking of comedy – your previous tours had superb names like Eat My Satire, Genocide Suicide Cancer, and, best of all, Local Borough Pest Exterminator. So what's your current tour called?
It's called Andy Parsons.

Did you really help run Cambridge Footlights?
Ah, that's a bit of a "Wikipedia fact". By which I mean it's not strictly speaking true. I was in Footlights but I didn't run it. It did give me my start in comedy though, and I had some pretty interesting contemporaries like Ben Miller and Sue Perkins.

In the fine tradition of Bob Mortimer and Clive Anderson you worked in law before doing comedy full-time. How did you make the leap?
Yeah, I studied law at uni and then was a legal clerk for a while. I wound up working on an endless, crushingly tedious case at Glasgow shipywards. It was basically rubbish in every way, but it did bring in a bit of money which allowed me to focus on comedy writing. I started going to meetings at the BBC where radio producers would allow me and the rest of the wannabe-comedian riff-raff to pitch ideas and scripts. The producers were probably horrified at the general quality level but somehow I persevered and got my foot in the door.

Your long-standing comedy partner is a chap called Henry Naylor, who isn't quite as well known as you. Is it a marriage made in comedy heaven? We've known each other since forever. Or since university, anyway. We wrote comedy together from the very beginning and we set up London's first sketch comedy club, TBA. It helps that we have similar tastes. For example, we come up with political comedy for people who don't like political comedy. Working together is a lot of fun – one of us scrabbling away on a sheet of paper while the other paces up and down, mad professor-style.

So what's coming up next in the world of Parsons?
Well, my next big project is a thing for Radio 4 called the Lost Blog of Scrobby Trevithick, which I've helped write. It'll be broadcast in June, I think, and I've got high hopes for it. You'll just love it.

Can we call you back and complain if we don't?
No.