PARENTING Hell podcaster, game show panellist and comedian Josh Widdicombe will play York Barbican on February 28 2026, the opening night of the second leg of his Not My Cup Of Tea stand-up tour.
London-born Widdicombe’s 58-date itinerary in 2025-2026 will take in further Yorkshire gigs at Hull City Hall on October 2, CAST, Doncaster, on October 4, and Victoria Theatre, Halifax, on November 1 2025. Tickets go on general sale at 11am on Friday at www.joshwiddicombe.com.
In the words of his tour announcement: “Josh Widdicombe is back on tour, not again! By now he has almost certainly mastered the art of stand-up. Either that or he has wasted the last 15 years of his life. Come along and decide for yourself. Expect it to be shorter and with lower production values than Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, but funnier and with more references to tea.”
Widdicombe, 41, co-hosts the Parenting Hell podcast with fellow comedian Rob Beckett, spawning an arena tour and a Sunday Times Bestseller Chart-topping book, Parenting Hell, How To Cope (Or Not) With Being A Parent, in 2023.
Widdicombe has co-hosted more than 30 series of multi-award-winning Channel 4 series The Last Leg, is a team captain on Sky Max’s Rob Beckett’s Smart TV and co-hosts Sky’s Hold The Front Page. The Plymouth Argyle supporter and former sports journalist has an almost complete collection of Panini football sticker books.
As well as three seasons of his Josh sitcom from 2014 to 2017, Widdicombe has chalked up multiple TV appearances on Hypothetical, QI, Live At The Apollo, A League Of Their Own, Insert Name Here, Have I Got News For You and Taskmaster, and he has performed at the Royal Albert Hall in a Royal Variety Performance.
He hosted the cult 1990s’ podcast Quickly Kevin: Will He Score?, playing multiple live shows, culminating in a final event at the London Palladium in May 2024.
In 2021, he released his first book, Watching Neighbours Twice a Day…How ’90’s TV (Almost) Prepared Me For Life, a childhood memoir of growing up on a diet of consuming far too much television in the 1990s.
This perennially frustrated observer of life’s foibles last visited York Barbican on October 3 2019 on his Bit Much stand-up tour: a night of grumbles and jokes in which Widdicombe “finally tackled the hot comedy topics of Advent calendars, pesto and the closing time of his local park”. Bit Much is now available on Sky and NowTV.
Here Josh Widdicombe discusses bringing his keen eye for the absurd side of the mundane to his new show, Not My Cup Of Tea, wherein he will take stock of the little things that niggle him, from motorway hotels to children’s parties, and explain why he has finally decided to embrace middle age, hot drinks and doing the school run.
How is the preparation for the tour going?
“It’s going way better than I thought. To the point where I could probably get away with doing it in the spring, but I didn’t want to put any pressure on myself. I want to enjoy it because in the past I was so busy with Mock The Week and Live At The Apollo and stuff, I was chasing my tail and desperately trying to have enough material for each tour. This time I’m able to enjoy the process of creating the stand-up.”
How have you found the experience of returning to tiny clubs to road-test material after doing Parenting Hell arena gigs in 2023?
“I’ve been doing 20-minute sets and it’s almost divorced from the fact that I’m going on tour, which I think is the best way to write a tour; like you’re just doing it for the sake of it, in the same way I suppose it must be nicest for a musician to just write songs for the sake of writing songs.
“I’m doing stand-up for the sake of doing stand-up at the moment. I love the experience of coming up with ideas and just being able to go and do them.”
Why have you called your new show Not My Cup Of Tea?
“Because I like the phrase. And since I gave up alcohol in 2023, I drink a lot of tea. As you get older, you realise who you are a bit more and I’ve realised that the things I love are like parochially British things, like Martin Parr’s photography or Blur or Alan Bennett.”
Is there a theme?
“If there is a theme, it’s probably about accepting that I prefer being at home and not having to deal with any other human beings. Which is a weird way to approach a tour show where you have to travel around the country talking to thousands of people!”
Are you more of an introvert comedian than a show-off comedian?
“When I stopped drinking, I realised how much the reason I drank was really for social situations because I didn’t feel comfortable in them. I grew up in Devon [in the tiny Dartmoor village of Haytor Vale], I was an only child in a small school and watched TV for hours a day, so I was quite introverted.
“Here’s a good example. I’m currently doing The Last Leg every day in Paris and everyone’s like, ‘do you want to meet up in the morning?’, and I’m like, ‘no, I’m spending ten hours a day working with you, I want the morning to myself so I can read a book in bed’.
“And there’s something about observational comedy; it’s about watching from the outside, so I wonder whether that is part of why I do comedy.”
As your comedic style is not topical, you don’t have to worry about writing political jokes now, and then the Prime Minister changing by the time the tour starts…
“That’s right. My last tour straddled Covid and when I came back to do the rescheduled dates, all of the stuff was still relevant. For me, it’s always where I just say something and I think ‘that would be fun for stand-up’. I’ll note that in my phone and work that up at a gig.
“Like I thought about talking about giving up drinking but realised that was never going to be as funny as talking about Inside The Factory with Gregg Wallace.”
You joke about everyday frustrations. Do you still have the same frustrations, now that you have had so much success with The Last Leg and Parenting Hell?
“I live a very mundane life and I really like that. I like leaning into the fact that I like doing the school run or the big shop. I suppose I’ve finally become comfortable with that. After years of not knowing who I was, I’m quite happy being middle-aged. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I like putting my kids to bed and watching a Netflix documentary about basketball even though I don’t like basketball.”
Do you expect you will draw a Parenting Hell audience on this tour?
“That’s interesting. Obviously, there’s people that won’t be there for Parenting Hell, so I’m not going to do loads of parenting stuff. There’s a bit about my family but not a huge amount. Sometimes an anecdote that works on the podcast doesn’t work as stand-up.
“There was a saga on the podcast about my number plate being cloned that I have turned into a routine, but stand-up isn’t just telling an anecdote like you would on the podcast. There have to be observations and jokes around the story.”
Are there any other new routines you think will make the finished show?
“There is a bit about children’s parties and party bags, so, as you can see, I’m dealing with the big issues! I take a huge pride in the banality of the topics I talk about. I think that’s my favourite type of stand-up: really niche observations about silly little things that you wouldn’t think about. I’ve got no interest in the big topics.”
Has Parenting Hell’s massive success changed your stand-up style?
“I think the podcast has had a huge impact on how I understand myself as a comedian. I spent years terrified of letting the audience know who I was, and then we did Parenting Hell and I suddenly saw that the more I showed myself, the funnier I am. So I think it will almost certainly be the case that I’ve changed, but I wouldn’t ever do it consciously.
“I saw Ed Gamble at the Hackney Empire recently and – I’d hate him to know this – I found it incredibly inspiring because he was funny every 20 seconds for an hour and 10 minutes, and that is everything I want to be. Just be as funny as possible.”
Did you find it easy to give up drinking?
“I gave up in April 2023 and I found gigs to be quite easy because you just enjoy the bands. Or going to a football match, I find that easy, but I wouldn’t find going to a party or a stag do easy because if I drink, I really drink. When I drank, it was a laugh until it was not a laugh.”
You have been so busy with TV, such as The Last Leg, have you missed stand-up?
“It took a while for me to think I wanted to do stand-up again after the pandemic. I think I got really used to being at home. I hadn’t had evenings off for 12 years, and for the first time I got my evenings back and I was like, ‘oh this is what it’s like and it’s really nice’. But now I’m really loving it again.”
Do you ever worry about how long success will last?
“It’s the curse of the freelance. You can go up and down in terms of venue size; I don’t know where I am on that graph. I’d rather work really hard and take the opportunities while they’re here now. One day they might not be here.
“People ask ‘why did you do that show?’ and you’re like, ‘because it’s fun, because I love it and I get paid really well to do what I love, so why wouldn’t I do it?’ I can’t believe that I got paid to go to the Paralympics. This is my hobby that got out of hand!”