Lee Mack on the future of Not Going Out – and his hopes to join Last One Laughing for season 2

As he explains, on hearing the clunk, he started to leave his details on the windscreen of the other car, only to realise it was his own vehicle he’d damaged. Because this is Lee Mack, mere seconds elapse before he’s exploring the comedic possibilities: in this case, the urban myths of motorists who seem to be doing the right thing, only for those notes to say: “I’m pretending to leave my details so that no one watching thinks I did a runner.”

It’s precisely the sort of scenario you can imagine percolating into a future episode of Not Going Out – which returns to BBC One this week for its 14th season with episode 101. And if the 56-year-old comic is to narrow the gap between his creation and Last of the Summer Wine’s record for sitcom longevity (295 episodes across 31 seasons), he’ll need to keep replenishing the pot.

As it happens, the longer you spend with him, the more you realise that the everyday business of living is a constant source of fresh material. Last August, like millions of others, Mack found hi

mself trying – and ultimately failing – to get tickets for the Oasis reunion gigs, when he realised "the one silver lining to this could be an episode about me trying to get tickets".

The result, four episodes into the new run, is Oasis, which finds Mack’s fictional namesake in the virtual queue to buy tickets for the Wembley shows. Desperate for the loo, Lee asks his wife Lucy (Sally Bretton) to make sure she doesn’t refresh the browser while he’s gone. Much of what ensues is exquisitely guessable, a gag-studded rumination on mid-life nostalgia for our carefree youth – and, in this case, a chance for Mack to pick up a guitar and unleash his preposterous approximation of the Liam Gallagher bellow.

Given that Oasis were still three years off calling it a day when the first episode of Not Going Out aired, it’s a surprise to find Mack anything but complacent about the reception that awaits the new episodes. In the past, he hasn’t been afraid to reinvent the show in order to mirror the changes in his own 20-year marriage to Tara, with whom he has three children, Arlo, Louie and Millie. Hence, what started as a cross between Men Behaving Badly and a British Seinfeld became a more traditional family sitcom. And now it’s all change once again.

With the kids having flown the nest, the opening episode finds Lee and Lucy viewing new properties. But anyone expecting a slide into cosy dotage should think again. Lee’s attempt to repel a competing house viewer results in a misunderstanding over a missing watch, a Stannah stairlift face-off with the vendor’s mother and a bag of poo. The result is a riot of manic farce that feels like a hilarious, heartfelt love letter to Fawlty Towers.

“Obviously, that’s music to my ears,” he says, more in relief than delight, “I still think that Fawlty Towers is the best ever studio sitcom, which, for me, is a separate thing to a sitcom made without an audience. The thing you always hear people saying about studio sitcoms is ‘they’re so '70s'. But then you ask people to name their favourite British sitcoms and they’re all from the '70s: Fawlty Towers! Dad’s Army! Steptoe and Son!”

Mack has long passed the point where he needs to keep making Not Going Out in order to maintain his profile. With Would I Lie to You? and, latterly, The 1% Club ensuring his almost constant presence on our screens, it must be tempting to relinquish the long months in the shed at the bottom of his garden where he and co-writer Daniel Peak plot each episode. “But then again”, he says, “there’s nothing I love better than writing jokes”.

The die was cast early. Mack grew up in Southport. His parents were pub landlords, and although they separated when he was 12, he doesn’t recall being affected by the split. He says his father could have just as easily been a comic and – as anyone who saw his Who Do You Think You Are? will know – comedy was what Mack’s great-grandfather actually did for a living. “Making people laugh,” he recalls, “was part of our shared language as a family. I always saw it as speed-dating but for friendship. You start at a new school and the ones that share your humour, you’re like, ‘OK. You, you and you. We’ll get along.’ And if you’re chatting someone up and they don’t find you funny, that’s the end of that.”

For 14-year-old Mack, The Young Ones “was my punk” – with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson his Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. In 2010 when Mack interviewed Edmondson for Radio 4’s Chain Reaction, you can hear his starstruck inner teenager trying to hold it together. But people change, and you then notice Mack struggling to reconcile the Edmondson of his formative memories with the somewhat downcast character he’s in conversation with.

“I remember that,” says Mack, “Didn’t he say something like, ‘One day, you realise there’s more to life than making people laugh’? Did I understand that at the time? Probably not. But I do now. I mean, have I changed? Yeah. It’s impossible not to.”

Answering his own question, he sounds almost defensive. The idea that he might be turning into a “showbiz w****r” seems to weigh upon him. It’s a recurring worry in his 2012 memoir Mack the Life, and something he brought up at the outset of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha, the podcast he co-hosted with his friend Neil Webster, which explored their mid-life fascination with Buddhism – including meditation, of which Mack is a passionate exponent. “Well yes. I mean, I stopped drinking over 10 years ago and you think, ‘Are these the clichés of being in our business?’”

I suggest that meditation and abstinence are hardly abuses of fame, and he nods as though the thought never occurred to him. He says that in 2014, after his brother Darren died of a fatal overdose, he could certainly have used some of the tools subsequently given to him by Buddhism. “Absolutely. I weigh it all up and [Buddhism] just feels true to me. But maybe it’s a Lancashire working-class thing, that inner voice that makes you worry you’ve got ideas above your station.”

That inner voice was there from the outset, he says, right from his first-ever TV job, hosting the Channel 4 stand-up showcase, Gas. “I got out of the car and someone said, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ And I remember my wife Tara saying, ‘Was that free?’ She was like, ‘That’s great, isn’t it?’ It was, but it was a bonus. And you’re always conscious that by the third series you could go from that to wondering why you’re not getting your coffee.”

The other abiding memory of his early TV career revolves around his break as a writer-comedian in Channel 4’s The Sketch Show. He recalls that after his first day on set, the TV company left him a gift – a CD Walkman – “and the following week at the office, I said to everyone, ‘I just want to thank you for the gift and the lovely basket of fruit.’ And they go, ‘What basket of fruit?’ I said, ‘You know! The one with the cellophane on!’ And they went, ‘That’s just what was in your room!’ And I’d proudly taken it home! I mean, it’s a good job I didn’t take the fridge, the telly, the sofa and the lightbulbs, too.”

For his memoir, Mack recorded a series of conversations with a psychiatrist, exchanges recounted throughout the book. “I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder],” he says, “but I did have this weird half-diagnosis from the psychiatrist. She said, ‘This isn’t how we diagnose it, but you’ve 100 per cent got it. So I believed her, but at the same time, would I take the tablets and go, ‘Are you telling me this is how people think when they haven’t got ADHD?’”

A De Niro-ish shrug ensues. And you can see why – there’s too much to lose. Watching him in full flight on Would I Lie to You? is one of the wonders of the comedy world. Show host Rob Brydon called him the “quickest mind of anybody – and I mean anybody – I have ever met.” What you see in action is a sort of inspired overthinking. “Well, most Buddhists would say everyone overthinks. That’s both the superpower and the curse, you know? Certainly most problems in my life have come from overthinking, and most of the benefits have come from overthinking. When I’m on Would I Lie to You?, I feel like I’m tuned into five conversations at once.”

If that’s the superpower, then what’s the curse? “If I’m not obsessionally writing jokes, I’m obsessionally worrying about something that is minuscule, but for the next 48 hours it’s all I’ll think about.” The ability to enter into a state of hyperfocus is a key characteristic of ADHD. It probably also came in useful on the day Mack – a lifelong darts fan – broke the official world records for the most bullseyes and number twos scored in one minute.

It’s perhaps also possible to detect aspects of Mack’s obsessional nature in the constraints he imposed upon himself when writing Not Going Out. In the new season, every storyline unfolds in real time. “What I’m trying to do is get the audience involved, to make them feel like they’re witnessing an event that’s happened,” he explains. “And hopefully that carries over when you’re watching at home.”

If he’s all but retired from straight stand-up, perhaps that’s because what you’re really getting with Not Going Out is stand-up comedy disguised as a sitcom. Even the table read – which, with almost all sitcoms happens behind closed doors – takes place before an audience in a Battersea pub. “I don’t disagree with that,” he concedes. “In the first series, I remember the director said to me and [his then co-star and fellow stand-up] Tim Vine, ‘You’re supposed to be having a conversation and you keep turning out to face the audience.’ Because our instincts were to play to the crowd.”

Before I set out to meet Mack, a mutual friend advised against looking for “hidden depths” because I’m unlikely to find any. If Mack’s friend is correct and there really are no “hidden depths”, that’s perhaps because this unabashed comedy nerd – who won friends at school with his perfect Cannon and Ball impersonation and ended up casting Bobby Ball as his TV dad – got what he wanted. If there’s one thing he seems to like more than making people laugh, it’s laughing himself.

He’ll spend five minutes explaining the set-up of his favourite Cannon and Ball gag only to crease up on the punchline – despite the fact that almost five decades have passed since he first saw them do it. He’s keen to participate in the next season of Amazon Prime’s all-star comedy variation on Big Brother, Last One Laughing, "because there’s nothing funnier than trying not to laugh". And he hopes John Cleese makes another season of Fawlty Towers because, “if it’s only half as funny as the ones that exist, it’ll still be twice as funny as everything else".

For a while, he thought that, were he gifted enough, he would probably swap his comedy success for the career of a professional footballer, “but when I became friends with some of them and saw the sacrifices they make, I changed my view. I would have once settled for Darlington. Now it’s Barcelona or nothing!”

Of course, had he done so, his footballing days would be long behind him. But a comic can go on indefinitely, right? “I was once at an awards ceremony with Jimmy Carr, back in the days when Bruce Forsyth was alive. And Jimmy said, ‘Isn’t our job brilliant? Look at Brucie over there, 80 and still doing it.’ And I thought, ‘Oh God, don’t tell me that.’ The idea of doing this when I’m 80 doesn’t fill me with joy. It’s the best job in the world, but it’s a job, and like all jobs, you want to retire at some point.”

And what’s the retired Lee Mack doing with his days? “He’s almost certainly in the garden,” says the version seated before me. “I love my greenhouse, and my missus always takes the mickey out of me, because when we first met in our 20s, I said, ‘I’m looking forward to getting old, retiring and pottering down to the newsagent’s for my little bar of chocolate and walking back again,’ and it was the most undynamic thing a new relationship could start with.”

So that’s still the plan? “That is still very much the plan. Just not yet.” Which, for the time being, is good news. After all these years, Lee Mack is still living his best life. And for as long as he’s willing to turn it into comedy, we get to live it too.

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Not Going Out is available to watch on BBC iPlayer. Season 14 will air on BBC One on Friday 13th June 2025 at 9pm. The whole season will also be available as a box set on BBC iPlayer from then.

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