Nick Helm on gigging at Edinburgh Fringe, eating his heart out on TV and why he doesn't want to be mainstream

Comedians usually go to the Edinburgh Fringe hoping to give their career and their ego a boost. Not Nick Helm. The star of Channel 4 series Loaded arrived in the Scottish capital this week to get match fit for his national tour this autumn. Unlike everybody else, he doesn’t seem that bothered about being a big star.

“I don’t want to be mainstream and I don’t want to be liked by everyone,” he says between sips of water in a quiet pub. If Helm’s aim is to avoid fame he is making a pretty bad fist of it. As well as playing recovering addict Watto in Loaded, next week he has a new 16-part food-based comedy, Eat Your Heart Out With Nick Helm, starting on Dave.

The bleary-eyed 36-year-old is relishing his tour after a lengthy break. “I’m really enjoying being onstage at the moment. I haven’t gigged much for a long time.” His compelling, self-flagellating performances have won him acclaim and awards. In 2011 he won Dave’s competition to find the funniest joke of the Fringe: “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

Television success has, however, caused problems. “People get confused. It’s like EastEnders fans who shout at Adam Woodyatt in the street thinking it’s Ian Beale.” People have turned up after seeing him on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and have been shocked by the monstrous, sweaty character.

You either embrace the concept or you don’t. He once did a Christmas show at the Soho Theatre shortly after he had been on a panel show which had caused a spike in ticket sales. “Some of the audience just stared at me for an hour.” A man approached him as he was sweeping up mince pie crumbs and told him he had enjoyed him on television but the show was awful. “I said, ‘This is me on a good night’.”

The Nick Helm sitting opposite me is more guarded than when I interviewed him in 2013. He told me then that his family moved from Finsbury Park to St Albans because it was an easier commute for his civil servant father but also “they were worried about my inner-city primary school because people were pushing dirty syringes through the chicken wire fence”. This time he is reluctant to reveal, for instance, whether he is in a relationship. “The less people know about me in real life... I’m not going to answer.”

So how much of Helm is there in his stage persona, who seems to have a nightly breakdown? “It’s my sense of humour so it obviously all comes from me but it is on an ironic level. The idea is that losing your temper with audience members is the opposite of what you should be doing as an entertainer.” He makes it sound like performance art as well as huge fun. “It’s not about being liked. The more people want to be liked onstage the worse they are offstage.”

He currently wants to balance TV work with touring. His BBC3 series Uncle finished this year but he is open to doing more. “I think the writers wanted a break. There is always a dream to make a film or a Christmas special.”

Helm hopes Loaded will return. “It was four boys being allowed to swear. It was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had.” It is a co-production with American company AMC, which made Breaking Bad. Helm suggests that it likes longer runs, so there’s a good chance.

What frustrates him, however, is that while he can control his live career, with television he is at the mercy of commissioners. He has spent more than a decade trying to get a series made based on a year he spent living in Brighton. A BBC one-off version entitled Elephant picked up a Bafta nomination but the idea is still in development hell. “You’ve got to have passion projects to get you up in the morning.”

Eat Your Heart Out, however, came about quickly. He shot a pilot, forgot about it and then received a call asking for 16 episodes. In it he travels to Berlin and Paris, among others, visiting restaurants, but one of his favourite episodes is set in Peckham. “There are two restaurants, Miss Tapas and Mister Bao, on opposite sides of the road, and the owners are married to each other.” Needless to say he ate in both of them on the same day.

The series straddles sitcom and foodie genres. “I’m me but it is another persona,” he explains. It sounds a little like the Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon series The Trip. “I flagged that up straight away. Steve Coogan is my hero. I would not be doing stand-up if it wasn’t for him but I don’t want to be him. We did change stuff when we saw their last series. I had motion sickness on a ferry and they did a scene on a ferry so we dropped it.”

At the centre of it is Helm eating four meals a day. “It sounds like a nice job but it’s a nice job for half a day, then it dawns on you that you are going to be having a lot of fried chicken and cocktails for breakfast. Look at me in the last series of Uncle, then this, and you can see the damage I have done to myself.” He is now slimmer than he was at the end of filming. “There’s no better way to lose weight than watching yourself in an edit.”

Whether Helm likes it or not he is going to be a big star. Though, thanks to his current diet, maybe not as big a star as he might have been.

Nick Helm is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh (edfringe.com) until August 27 and at Leicester Square Theatre, WC2 (leicestersquaretheatre.com) on November 11 & 18. Eat Your Heart Out With Nick Helm starts on Dave on August 24 at 8pm