Apparently simply being Alan Davies is not enough to make you the leading authority on being Alan Davies.

And I tell you what, Alan Davies is a little bit miffed about it.

The Essex-born comedian transforms from loving father, verging on soppy, when he talks about his lovely life in Hampstead Heath with his wife and two children, to incensed spokesman for the wronged, when I ask if he will be raising his little rascals as pescetarians.

“I’m not a pescetarian. Someone put it on Wikipedia and it slightly dogs me,” he groans. “I can’t do anything because I tried to edit my Wikipedia page a few years ago and ended up getting banned from Wikipedia.

“Unless you’ve got some proof when you put something on there they won’t accept it.

“So I said ‘the proof is that it’s me and I would consider myself the leading authority on my life’. But no, they disagreed with me on that.”

The comedian, famous for appearing on cerebral series QI and mystery crime drama Jonathan Creek, grows increasingly animated as he continues: “I haven’t looked at my Wikipedia page for years because it would make me incensed.”

He previosuly had a reputation for extreme behaviour – he famously bit a tramp’s ear outside The Groucho Club in 2007 after he verbally abused him – but it seems family life has subdued him.

“It’s laughable really. There was some specky student who saw himself as custodian of my page and he turned up at the QI green room. I didn’t speak to him but I wanted to hit him with a chair.”

Speaking of QI, which has resulted in strangers shouting ‘blue whale’ at him in the street, will Alan’s stand-up delay him being back on our screens?

“Actually there’s lots of TV. I’m doing a show for Dave called As Yet Untitled, there’s more QI pencilled in for next year and the possibility of a sitcom with Jo Brand.”

Does he ever get tired of playing the fool to the genius of Stephen Fry, who he describes as “one of the good ones”?

“I’m resigned to it now and I have a big mortgage so I will play that role as long as they will have me. It will be a sad day when it finally shuts down, but hopefully we can get to Z, I’ll be 62, and will stop then.”

In the meantime Alan is touring the country with his stand-up show Little Victories following his return to the circuit in 2012, and says he will be talking a lot about the challenges of parenting.

“You have to realise you are going to be sacrificing an important part of your life and have to find the pleasure in life with your children and not in the pub.”

The 48-year-old says his own childhood was difficult: “My biggest loss was losing my mum and that’s the only thing that comes to mind when I hear the word.”

He was just six when she died from leukaemia and he hated school but as a teen found happiness in comedy and football.

The Arsenal fan took to stand-up like a duck to water in the late '80s and was named Time Out's Best Young Comic in 1991 and won the Edinburgh Festival Critics Award for Comedy in 1994.

But then he found success on screen and touring took a back seat. So what changed?

“My biggest loss professionally was a few years ago, I was doing a sitcom called Whites and it got cancelled after one series and it was a huge disappointment. That really stung and was one of things that prompted me back to stand-up, because I want to be in control. When you have got kids you think ‘I’ve got to get out and do something so we can have a nice house and a nice life. I can’t wait about for these idiots to cock it up for me’.”

His family has also inspired his new tour and he talks about his daughter being bitten by a dog, his father’s Alzheimers and trying to ‘keep up’ with his youthful wife.

He says: “I’m not 100 per cent happy with the title. I called the last one Life is Pain and I wanted to call this one Sex is Pain but my promoters thought I might put people off. So I called it Little Victories and I think I might have made a mistake.”

He laughs as I point out that he might have attracted a different type of audience entirely with his original title.

I made Alan Davies laugh. My own little victory.

Alban Arena, Civic Centre, St Albans, Saturday, March 14, 8pm. Details: 01727 844488, alban-arena.co.uk