THE usually sunny Dave Gorman is mid-rant.

It’s all to do with a comment on Twitter relating to his Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop and Stand Up tour.

What a shame, somebody has written, that he has stopped cycling in between gigs.

“That’s like saying to someone who’s just won a marathon ‘it’s such a shame you’re not running a marathon anymore’,” he muses.

“I crossed the finishing line. Instead of celebrating and saying ‘well done’, people are really cross with me for not carrying on. It’s slightly odd.”

The original leg of the tour started off, not as a comedy show, but as a bike ride.

“Like a lot of men approaching 40 I was wondering whether I could still do things,” explains Gorman, who is at the Liverpool Empire on Saturday.

“I can guarantee this morning five fat accountants set off from Lands End on their way to John O’Groats.

“It’s what men of a certain age do, and I’m one of them.”

At the same time, he was planning to cycle to the most northern, southern, eastern and western points of the country, his manager was pushing him to take up stand-up again.

They decided to fuse the two ideas together and it was one of those moments, he says, “where if we were a boyband we’d have been standing up off our stools and there would have been a key change as we realised something significant was happening”.

As the venues had to be close enough to each other to cycle between, and many were in remote parts of Britain, Gorman found himself playing unusual venues.