VIDEO: Watch Maisie Adam talk to Phil Hewitt/SussexWorld about her debut tour coming to Hastings

Maisie Adam’s final few dates include Hastings’ Azur Marina Pavilion on March 8.

At last it allows Maisie to pick up where she left off. Maisie was famously the stand-up newcomer, completely inexperienced, who did a full-hour set for her first-ever gig back in 2016. A few months later she won the UK’s largest stand-up contest: So You Think You're Funny? Now she’s back and she is moving on: “It was originally supposed to be 33 dates in the autumn last year, September/October and it was my first proper tour. I just thought ‘Great!’ but it went really, really well and more and more dates were added and it ended up being another 33. And it's been absolutely lovely. I've completely loved it. With it being my first tour I was used to doing shows with other comedians and not actually having an audience that was dedicated to me so there is a lot of pressure. I just didn't really know how it would go down but it's been really great.”

In hindsight, working as support for those other comedians – including Jason Manford, John Bishop and Suzi Ruffell – has been absolutely the perfect apprenticeship: “The crowds just vary so much. Different comedians have very different crowds. It's the changing demographics but it's also changing geographically. And there are some people in the audience where you go on and you get the reaction ‘Oh, I was coming to see the main person’ but you do get lots of other people who, when you go on, just think ‘Oh fantastic, we're getting two comedians.’ And it's just been such good fun. You get to go to so many different places. A lot of them are places I have played before doing other gigs with other people but there are also new ones and I love getting to know the place and the crowd. My show is 30 minutes and then a break and then 70 minutes, and the first section is all about getting to know the crowd and getting to know the area that we are in and that's what I love about comedy.” It means absolutely living on her wits and that's what it's all about: “It means that every show is spontaneous and different and it just never gets to be monotonous. You just don't know what is going to happen from one night to the next. Anybody who does stand-up will tell you that that's what the big thrill of it is. It's not like being an actor where you have rehearsed it and you know exactly what you're going to say and exactly where you're going to stand. Being an actor you don't engage with the audience and you've actually got that fourth wall but as a comedian you have got a loose script and you stick loosely to it but the lovely thing is you just don't really know where it's going to go.”

Yorkshire-born Maisie has been living in Brighton for the past five years: “Five years ago I was gigging more and more and I was sent by my agent to a lot of gigs that were down south and I found myself always being on the Megabus travelling down here. Really I just had to move down south for my work but there was no way I was ever going to move to London. I'm from rural Yorkshire and the idea of moving to a big city like London just wasn't on.”

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