Debut tour for ex-banker turned stand-up Eshaan Akbar

That’s the theme Eshaan Akbar will be exploring on his debut stand-up tour which comes to The Hawth, Crawley on March 1 and G Live Guildford on April 14: “The tour is called The Pretender and the idea is that we are all pretending in various different ways.”

The fascination is also that with any given debate we are all supposed to be 100 per cent on one side or 100 per cent on the other – a particular challenge for Eshaan when he was growing up in a household which spanned a huge political divide between his trade union Labour dad and his mum who was “dyed-in-the-wool” Thatcherite.

“I had to learn how to manage that political divide. If I wanted to have dinner, I would have to be full-on Thatcherite.”

And is he? “Really I don’t talk about my political beliefs as such but what I think just depends on what the issue is and it surprises some people the thoughts that I have on certain things. I was privately educated and I was a banker for many years and I've been a journalist of some kind too and now I am doing the comedy, and I just look at issues in every different way.”

The tour is Eshaan’s debut: “It's my first ever tour, and the main reason is because my agent told me to do it. I've been doing comedy for coming up for nine years and I've been very lucky and blessed with all the opportunities I have had. It just really felt that the now was the right time to do this to tour. I've done a lot of support work with the widest range of comedians and it's been great. I've been all around the country doing support gigs and club gigs.”

And he's enjoyed it: “The support work has been good because I'm good at what I do. I go on stage and I know that the people are not there to see me but by the end of it a lot of people are wanting to see me again. I've really enjoyed the support work and the interesting thing is it depends on the comedian that you're supporting. I've supported Mickey Flanagan and Jason Manford and they have great mainstream appeal and I’ve supported others where the appeal is to a much younger and much more off the beaten path audience. You have to adapt to accommodate to the audience you've got and that's really good experience. I also do Radio 4 comedy and a young largely black and Asian audience and also an older predominantly white audience. It's great to have those different audiences.

“I do think about the art of comedy. Comedy is such an amazing art form and it does feel that that comedy rewards wisdom. The older you get, the better you are at it.”

Eshaan began comedy in 2014: “I was in banking and I don't think anybody really dreams of sitting at a desk punching numbers into a spreadsheet all day. I hadn't intended to be a comedian. It was just a hobby.”

But in the event, pursuing comedy seriously coincided with the passing of his mother: “She passed away very suddenly and the suddenness of her passing coincided with me thinking me about how quickly life can go and the importance of just trying different things. It just made me think that I should try comedy, just give it a go.”

Eshaan’s father played cricket at a high level and could have gone further: “But he had to give it up because he had a family and he had responsibilities but I just wish that he had tried to take it further and that was part of my decision to give comedy a go. Sometimes life can change in the blink of an eye and when I think of all that my parents did for me and all the opportunities that gave me, I just thought I would be doing them a disservice if I didn't take the opportunities I had.”