AFTER shows about beloved passions of cycling and music, Lance and Maestro, character comedian Kieran Hodgson is now “bravely shining a light on the trickiest question of our time”. Europe.

Bravely because some comedians have steered away from the B word, for fear of the subject being so divisive from the outset, but for Kieran, Brexit could not have been closer to home, as his Burning Duck Comedy Club audience in York will discover tomorrow (April 4).

The 2016 Referendum drove apart the closest, most loving of familial relationships between mother and son; his mum voted Leave, Kieran, Remain, and ‘75 recounts his attempts to reunite with his politically polar opposite under the ever-lengthening shadow of Brexit.

“It doesn’t take a great piece of detective work to work out that a young man, living in London, working in the arts, would vote Remain!” says the Two Doors Down BBC2 sitcom regular.

Subsequently, Kieran has grabbed the Brexit bull by the horns. “I’ve not done it by halves, because it’s a topic that’s so divisive and for which every argument has a counter argument, so, for me, that meant I had to do it thoroughly,” he says.

“That required reading lots of books to learn more about what I’m talking about, approaching it in a detailed way, though inherently it’s an emotional subject.”

Kieran confesses to always having been an history know-it-all, so much so that when he struggles to make conversations, he will resort to a game of “Let’s name all the Prime Ministers in reverse order”, much to the intense dislike of his friends and family.

Post-Referendum, he decided to bring a new purpose to his obsession with history books, turning to them in order to “make sense of how we got here and heal the wound”.

“We’ve had 1,000 days since the Referendum and everything that could be said has been said, so my means of finding a new way to talk about it is to look at it through the lens of history,” he says.

Consequently, in ‘75, Kieran interweaves a tale of intimate, personal relationships and a personal quest for understanding with one of epic European history and the surprising tale of how Britain joined Europe in the first place.

He warns you to expect a story of passion and betrayal as he overestimates his intellectual abilities and fills his show with descriptions of voting systems and a rogue’s gallery of historical figures that he brings back to life.

Step forward “awkward war hero and perhaps questionable Prime Minister Ted Heath, milk-snatching pioneer Margaret Thatcher, and Huddersfield’s most famous son – after Kieran himself, he jokes – Harold Wilson”.

The show takes its title of ‘75 from the far less febrile Referendum poll of June 5 1975 when voters approved continued Common Market membership by 67 per cent to 33 per cent. “That was the first Referendum in our country’s history, so ‘75 seemed a pertinent title to explore our pre-Brexit history; 1975 was a good flashpoint to build the show around,” says Kieran.

Broadening his focus, he continues: “The Seventies in general tend to suffer from a lack of pop culture awareness because the Sixties cast a long and easily digestible cultural shadow and we could all get behind The Beatles and James Bond, but The Osmonds were harder to get behind in the Seventies, and the politics of the Seventies were very complicated and knotty, whereas the Eighties equals Thatcher, a big iconic figure.

“The Seventies were unattractive and easy to jumble up, but, for me, all the complications are what makes the era interesting.”

The Seventies are set in stone, but the tectonic plates of Brexit are still grinding like gnashed teeth. “With most disagreements you would get over it, but with Brexit it seems to put you into two tribes, and I don’t see much of a shift in the opinions of those tribes,” says Kieran.

“There’s just been entrenchment, which is why we have this log jam, but I don’t have the answers. A big part of the show is that the more you know, the less you know the answer, and the more facts I learn, the more biographies I read, it just muddies it.”

Amid the entrenchment, one central figure has become more prominent in Kieran’s show, the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow MP. “I’ve benefited from John Burcow’s increasing notoriety,” he says. “In recent months, I’ve brought him more into it, because he’s so hammy, he’s quick-witted, a man of culture.

“I admire how he can launch into long sentences with a lot of subordinate clauses and still makes sense. He speaks like a textbook. I sort of run aground mid...”

Kieran Hodgson: ‘75, Burning Duck Comedy Club, The Basement, City Screen, York, April 4, 7.30pm. Box office: burningduckcomedy.com