In Animal, you talk about always having wanted to write a book. What was a foremost aspiration: Stand up or writing?

Well, I’d never seen stand up when I was growing up and I didn’t really know about it, mostly because we didn’t watch television. By the time I was 18 I’d only seen two or three comedians on TV. I hadn't seen live comedy until I was 27. Before that I thought comedy was silly and that the world was very serious. So probably writing a book!

However, because I started writing it after doing stand up, I found writing it was such a joy because of the absence of having to make everything constantly funny. I’m on tour at the moment and the stuff that isn’t funny enough has to be taken out.... You’ve told people you’re giving them a certain form of entertainment... so you have to give them that. With the book, it wasn’t so pressured.

How did the idea for Animal come about?

I was researching a lot of the topics anyway. Partly because I wanted to talk about female sexuality in the show. And the rest of it was about trying to understand myself and my psychology. At some point that became more scientific and about hormones and neurotransmitters... and then that turned into the book.

So you didn’t quite set out to cover the history of evolution?

After the original pitch my agent came back to me and said, “I’m not saying this is BAD but it’s hard and serious.” And I said, “Yep, I’ve got a year to write it. Fine.” I didn’t doubt myself, but then you start and you have blank pages and unread text books and a third of the way in, writing about consent, I did panic, I felt: ‘This is too huge for me. There’s too much to do.’

The book makes biology easy for people like me who grapple with scientific information. Were you into science when you were younger?

No. I’m a recent adopter... kicking myself about how little attention I paid at school. I don’t know if that was because bad teaching didn’t get me interested or because the syllabus just didn’t show you the relevance of how a cell works in your own life. Either way, looking back I feel like you don’t have any idea at the time what you’re missing out on. I remember adults saying to me “I’d do anything to learn all day now” and me thinking 'you’re an idiot’. And now I’m that guy.

I guess that brings us onto your unusual choice of form – human evolution told through the lens of autobiography. They serve each other well because your personal anecdotes brings the science stuff to life...

It’s exactly like that – I wanted to give the science in small chunks. I had to write with someone in mind; I was hoping my book would read by different people but thought that the most important person might be a 14 or 15-year-old girl. Particularly because I would have appreciated a book like Animal at that age. I didn’t want them to close the book and say, “nah, you lost me”. So I limited myself; I decided to talk about three hormones in the book, and then I looked for stories that could illustrate or prove this information, or make it less confusing. As human beings I think we love being told stories, it helps turn the pages. I wanted to have enough of those that you didn’t realise how much information you’re actually getting.

If you had read this when you were younger, how would it have helped you?

I’d have been better about boys. You can’t tell young people enough about consent and about female pleasure because those conversations are just not had. I’m in my early thirties now and I’ve been having these conversations for a couple of years, but I could have known that earlier – I could have known that I was in culture that doesn’t talk about female pleasure properly. It takes a while for you to wake up to things, things like ‘why do magazines keep telling me to put on sexy underwear?’