Accepted wisdom has it that you only appear on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here if your career has tanked.

When it comes to Dom Joly, however, accepted wisdom doesn't work.

He stepped into the jungle (and came a more than respectable fourth) purely because he’d just signed a movie deal, a book deal and a TV deal and – as he puts – ‘didn’t need the show at all.’ “I confess I love reality TV,” he begins a little awkwardly.

“I shouldn't, but I think ‘I’m a Celeb’ is the most brilliantly made show in the world.

"They've asked me every year, like they ask everyone, and I’ve always said ‘no’ because I once wrote an article calling it the ‘Death of Hope’.

“But suddenly I had all these deals so I thought – if I'm ever going to go on it, it’s now, because I’ll feel good,” he grins.

“And it had Jenny Eclair and Shaun Ryder and I lost so much weight that it was genuinely good for me.”

Of course, in a sense Joly has always been about defying conventional wisdom.

From Trigger Happy he became a BBC chat show host, sketch show performer, travel writer and presenter, sports columnist and war zone author.

Add movie star to that – his Borat-style film War of the Flea is currently in development in the US – and you've got the impossible career arc, one that shouldn't have been possible across the vapid celebrity culture of the noughties.

There’s only one thing he’s absolutely clear about – he is not a stand-up comedian.

“My problem was after Trigger Happy, everyone assumes I'm a comedian,” he grins engagingly.

“ I've never done any stand up. My big fear in life is public speaking and stand-up.

"Even when I was the best man to someone, it was my idea of utter hell.”

And then he returned from the jungle to find his agent had booked a 70-date stand-up tour... I just didn’t know what to do…” he looks aghast.

“And then I realised that was the point. I don’t know what I do.

“My kids don’t even know what I do. They think ‘Dom Joly’ is a job.

"They once asked ‘What is Dom Joly?’ So that’s what the show is – it’s me trying to work out actually what I do.”

As a guide, he’s showing his holiday photos. Kind of.

He’s been taking photos all his life – he’s got more than 10,000, which probably puts him up there with Getty Images – and so his life unfolds in images.

It’s not the typical slideshow because, whatever you say about Joly, you can’t say he hasn’t lived.

If you went to school with Osama Bin Laden, pranked Michael Portillo, worked in Prague for the European Union, caught crocodiles in Australia and got drunk on TV in Moscow, Miami and Mexico, you’re going to have stories.

It even starts with a full-scale war. Born in Beirut in 1967 to expat parents, Joly was at the local English school when the 1975 civil war broke out – the school Bin Laden went to, although Osama was 18 when Joly was six so they didn’t hang out.

“I remember seeing all sorts of weird things,” he recalls. “I found six heads, below our school.”

In 1976 his parents sent him back to England – to Dragon School in Oxford where Joly’s father attended years earlier.

“He had a terrible time, so what does he do? Sends me to the same place,” Joly still sounds slightly angry all these years later.

“I think it’s because it’s the only thing he understood.

“We didn’t get on, to be honest. “I don’t think he’s ever seen anything I’ve done.

"We've been estranged for 15 years. And before that it was sort of disapproval.

“But he’s so emotionally crippled, as I am, that he probably couldn’t even express that.”

All the same, the separation and isolation gave him that outsider status – not to be cherished at the time when he was the kid from Lebanon who could speak Arabic trying to fit in at an English boarding school, but valued later as it drove his career.

He said: “If you are an outsider in some way, I think that allows you to observe. but I wasn’t thinking about that when I was eight.

"So the message of this show is simple – I'm not a shouty person as everyone thinks I am.

“ I'm misunderstood.’ * Dom Joly Welcome To Wherever I Am — Burnley Mechanics, Friday, June 10. Tickets on 01282 664400; Guildhall & Charter Theatre, Preston, Monday, June 20; Forum Twenty Eight, Barrow-in-Furness, Friday, July 8; The Lowry, Salford, Saturday, July 16.