Nish Kumar’s latest stand-up special is to air on Sky, the comic has revealed.

Based on his last tour,  Your Power, Your Control, the show will air on Sky Comedy and on demand from August 1.

‘I am very pleased – largely because I paid to film it myself on spec,’ he told the Always Be Comedy Podcast. ‘I’m relieved; my accountant is also relieved.’

The through line for the show is the incident from December 2019 when the audience at the Lord’s Taverners’ charity Christmas lunch at Grosvenor House in  Park Lane, London, turned on him – with one lobbing a bread roll – because they disagreed with his politics. 

The former Mash Report host said: ‘I have filmed me doing 80 minutes of stand-up comedy about it, that will be available later in the year.’

It will follow the stand-up specials by Katherine Ryan and Rob Beckett which debuted on Sky last year.

Kumar also says he has ‘no plans to tour a stand-up show’ in the immediate future, but is gigging ‘purely doing it for my own amusement’ – and so he could get booked for summer festivals and hang out with his friends.

He also told the podcast about his early days in comedy, saying: ‘I definitely remember doing stand-up and thinking, I think this is what my brain was built for in some way. 

‘I think it this brings together all of my interests: I like getting up performing in front of people, I like making people laugh, but I also like the freedom to be able to talk about whatever I want, in whatever manner I choose. So I thought this is certainly what I should be chasing. 

‘I must have had a pretty ironclad sense of myself to get through at least like four years of absolutely no professional success. But there would always just be little things that happened over the course of the year, that would make me think, "Oh, well, I'm still on the right track for something".’

He also spoke of developing his style, thinking that in the beginning he ‘thought that you had to be very affable on stage, and you had to talk about things people were interested in. 

‘Then I thought, "Oh, no, if you're going to talk about serious things, you should be like Bill Hicks and be serious" and then, when I watched Bridget  Christie, I thought, "Oh, no, you have to be true to whatever version of yourself is most comfortable engaging with people".’

‘It's always a bugbear of mine were comedians say "Tou have to be you have to go out there and tell the truth, man" and I’m like, "No, that's a  fundamental misunderstanding of everything. You have to go out there and tell jokes. You keep your truth to yourself!

‘But the audience can sniff out dishonesty. And I don't mean dishonesty, literally. I mean, they can sniff out if somebody is doing something that they think they should be doing rather than something they want to be doing. ‘

‘That's what you have to find as a comedian. What you are most comfortable doing. For some people, it'll be one liners. For some people, it will be characters. For some people, it will be political stand-up pretty much delivered as themselves as they are offstage. 

Kumar  was speaking to promote his own podcast Pod Save The UK, which he hosts with Guardian journalist Coco Khan.