Sara Pascoe is on her biggest tour yet. ‘It’s not super huge,’ the comedian tells Charles Hutchinson, but it does give her room to experiment.

HER show may be called Sara Pascoe Vs History, but Sara is very much of the moment.

So much so that she is undertaking her first British tour in the wake of her nomination for the 2014 Fosters Comedy Award for Best Show at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe.

“It’s not super huge,” she says ever so modestly, when in reality the extended itinerary will run to 50 dates, ending on February 5, before a London finale at the Soho Theatre from February 16-21.

Four Yorkshire shows in four nights await her in Hull, York, Leeds and Harrogate, from Monday.

“Doing a tour now is more about my confidence as a performer,” says Sara, who has plenty of short, sharp contributions to her name on the BBC’s QI, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Mock The Week and Channel 4’s Stand Up For The Week, as well as acting roles in The Thick Of It, W1A, Twenty Twelve and Channel 4’s Campus.

“Some people like being on stage for a long time but for me, getting to do an hour on stage at Edinburgh for the first time was quite a Herculean effort,” she adds.

“Last year was the first time I found it easier. Now I’m doing a 90-minute tour show with an interval, learning how to warm up the audience and be my own MC.”

A long stretch of shows brings its own demands. “I’ve been experimenting, trying to put in as much new stuff as possible as people expect it, and you find that stuff that felt topical in Edinburgh is now out of date,” says Sara.

“Sometimes, it can be that something happened, like Miley Cyrus being in the news, but then you can update it with Jennifer Lawrence having her photos stolen.

“I would use the analogy that a joke floats, then one day it sinks and it’s ‘see you later’, but also a joke can start to irritate you; a joke can get better for a while but then it goes stale and you have to drop it.”

Sara Pascoe vs the tide of history.

Live comedy is unpredictable, no two shows will be the same and Sara can never be sure how an audience will react.

“When a show goes badly, if the audience was quiet, that’s fine, but if you did something yourself that went badly, you have 24 hours of telling yourself off and you just have to re-focus,” she says. “When the next audience are friendly and louder, a switch goes off and you think, ‘thank God for that’.”

Another challenge of a long tour is to pace yourself.

“You tend to breathe it all in and the beauty is that adrenaline kicks in, so five minutes before a show, you might want to take nap, but five minutes in, the adrenaline takes over,” says Sara. “I’m at the point in my career where I feel really privileged because people want to come to the shows.”

And so the tour has grown to 50 shows. “It’s definitely required that you keep working, but that applies to any form of the arts. In my case, it’s a lot to do with always having more to say, so you always want to do gigs,” she says Sara has entitled past shows Sara Pascoe The Musical and Sara Pascoe Vs The Truth and now she continues the snappy titles with Sara Pascoe Vs History.

“I always chose one word – ‘Musical’, ‘Truth’, ‘History’ – because it gives a show a bit of a theme, but history is anything and everything,” she says. “I wanted to talk about evolution, my parents, ex-boyfriends, so it’s all those different things that history can mean.”

Her tour publicity says that Sara has “a comedy brain that leaps from stimulating arguments onto abstract confabulation with lumpy doses of openness, honesty and earnestness, Sara shares her romantic history, existential theory and cultural insights”.

Existential theory, Sara? “Actually I wrote the blurb before the tour started, and my last show, about truth, was much more existential; this time, less so,” she says, truthfully.

Sara, who studied English Literature at Sussex University, has ambitions to write a novel and maybe a semi-autobiographical sitcom one day. More immediately, she has been commissioned for a pilot by BBC Radio 4 and has a new Edinburgh Fringe show to prepare for the summer, one with a break from past titles.

“This time I think it’s going to be called The Museum Of Robot Pussycats; this tour has obviously taken its toll. My next show will be more experimental because, now that people are coming to see my shows, I can give them something they’re not expecting or something I’ve definitely not said on the telly,” she says.

“So I’ve written a story about robot pussycats where people have got bored with selfish cats. Every time a cat goes to the vet, they put a robot in them that makes them really clingy and all very similar, so people get bored with that too and stick them in a museum. Basically we’re never happy with what we’ve got.”

History would tell you that.

• Sara Pascoe vs History tours Fruit Space, Hull, January 19; Hyena Lounge Comedy Club, The Duchess, York, January 20, doors, 7pm, show, 8pm; The Wardrobe, Leeds, January 21; Harrogate Theatre, January 22. Box office: Hull, 01482 221113; York, 0844 477 1000 or hyenalounge.com; Leeds, thewardrobe.co.uk/event/sara-pascoe/; Harrogate, 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk.

Did you know?

When Sara Pascoe made her debut on BBC2’s QI in late 2013, she won by a whopping +28 points.