EVERYONE has had things they really wish they could get off their chest but know they just can’t say in public.

The answer, for comedian Andrew Lawrence at least, is to say it on stage instead.

The 35-year-old, who was born in Kingston and lived for a while in Forest Hill before settling in High Wycombe, is making a name for himself with his bleak, depressive humour and quick-fire rants.

He said: “It’s a heightened, elevated part of my personality which is suited to making people laugh that is not necessarily appropriate or acceptable in real life.

“Maybe that’s why I’m driven to do stand up so I can say things I can’t say to people otherwise.

“There are things we would all like to say that we can’t and that’s what stand up can be for, really, to speak the truth.”

Andrew, who won BBC New Act of the Year in 2004 and you may have seen on Live at the Apollo and Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, brings his latest tour There’s No Escape to The Woodville in Gravesend on February 27.

Rarely for a comedian, he has been touring it for a while but rather than performing six nights a week for three months with an identical show he has been performing two or three nights a week and developing the show as the tour progresses.

He said: “I work in a fluid way. When I’m developing a new show I don’t come up with an hour and a half or two hours all in one go and throw it all out on stage of a night.

“I try two or three minutes a night of different stuff, so by the time I finish one tour I have got a completely new show. The show just evolves gradually.”

Anyone who has seen Andrew perform will have been left in stitches at his long, fast-flowing, observational diatribes which you imagine must take a long time to perfect, but Andrew said they come instinctively.

He said: “The first time I do those rants on stage, they are spontaneous.
“I know where I’m starting and where I’m going to end up. After I have done it on stage once or twice off the cuff then it beds down and it becomes, in a strange way, rehearsed.

“All comedians have to have a good memory. It comes naturally to me.

“It’s instinct and you’re doing what comes naturally and you can’t define it.”

Andrew Lawrence’s There’s No Escape is at The Woodville in Gravesend on February 27. Tickets cost £16 or £14. Go to Woodville.co.uk or call 01474 337 774.