The making of Limmy: The comedian on life, fame and Glasgow

He can talk, our Brian Limond, and he knows it.

“Oh sorry,” he says, more than once. “I’ve went and out-rambled myself.”

Limond may call it rambling, and rambling it occasionally is, but his stream of consciousness responses to anything I put to him are funny, frank and thoughtful as well as littered with eloquent profanity.

More than once he finishes a soliloquy and then asks me what the question was. On not a single occasion can I remember.

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Limond is about to return to television for the first time in four years with Limmy’s Homemade Show, a collection of comedy clips filmed on his own and which claw back a bit of credibility for selfie sticks.

They are trademark Limmy: dark, bizarre, observant and bonkers, with Glasgow the ever-present extra character.

Limmy’s comic inventions are full of pathos. They are hilarious but there’s a sadness to each too. In this new collection, Limond sets up a scene with two characters: one is down in the dumps, the other trying increasingly desperately to cheer his friend up with a silly, childish hand gesture. The attempt fails and a row breaks out between them about self-worth.

Is it meant to be funny? I ask Limond, because I found it heartbreaking.

He assures me it is, chuckling to himself at the thought of it.

“It's meant to be sort of funny and kind of nice,” the 43-year-old says, “I find heartbreaking stuff really funny. That's my way of expressing it and interpreting it.” Here he can’t help but put on a voice, sending himself up at the pretentious notion of “interpreting”. He does that very particular Posh Glasgow voice, the worst of all the Glasgow voices.

“[It’s about] personal stuff, sexual stuff, men's insecurities about sexual stuff, not feeling good about yourself, low self-confidence that may be affecting you sexually and how you see yourself in relationships," he says.

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Speaking of not feeling good about yourself, Limond has spoken often and openly about his mental health and he chats at length about it, about how it’s currently taken “a wee dip”.

Limond, who grew up in Carnwadric, on Glasgow’s south side, describes himself as having been “dead f***ing angry” for a long time, before he started taking the antidepressant medication Citalopram. He is very quick to say he’s no doctor and that his experience isn’t a recommendation, it is a chance to show others in a similar situation that talking helps, that asking for help works.

Old Brian would have dwelt obsessively about something someone had said to him, allowing it to percolate, allowing himself to seethe.

Then he took the pills and “on the pills I was just happy.” He came off Citalopram but kept up the behaviours he’d developed while taking them.

In Limmy’s Homemade Show another sketch undercuts the notion of “going for a walk” being a good brightener, a way to clear your head. So what does he do then, for his health?

Meditation is one, getting a good night’s rest another. “Not eating sh**e,” a third, and cycling. But recently he’s not been too good at any of those things. “I've not been looking after my mental health,” he says.

“So it's taken a wee sort of dip [and I’ve been] getting pissed off. I was getting a lift with Lynne (his girlfriend of 18 years) and (their son) Daniel was in the back and I just was angry about something.

"We were going over the flyover and I felt like just opening the door and jumping right out and just ending it underneath another motor. And then I said to myself, ‘What a f***ing spoilt b*****d I am.

“You're giving me a lift to this show tonight, and it's been going well and I'm looking forward to it and the tour's almost sold out and I've got a thing on telly in a fortnight and I'm like ‘I'm so angry I just want to throw myself out the car.’ And it made me laugh and that was it, it went away.”

He adds: “I was thinking recently I might go back on the anti-depressants because I'm getting no joy from life, I'm not happy with anything. But then I said to myself, you’re not exercising, you don't go out the house for days, you’re eating sh**e – sort all of that out first.”

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Where Old Brian would have raged, shouted at people in the street, New Brian is Zen about his fellow man. “If I thought that by getting angry folk would really remember, really make a change and they would tell 10 of their pals and it would spread like a virus and everybody would get better I would do it, but I don't think it does, what's the point in getting angry?

“Sometimes I see people be careless – sorry for rambling on – but I almost see them as like boulders falling down a cliff, they don't know what they're doing. It's like shouting at a boulder.” He pauses. “Aye, can you stick that in? That's a good one.” The Posh Glasgow accent re-emerges. "It is like a boulder falling down a cliff,” he deadpans and then hoots.

As well as the new BBC show, Limond is currently touring a live show around the UK and Ireland, Limmy’s Vines. He introduces the Vines – short clips shown on the now-defunct website – and then takes part in a Q&A afterwards. The Glasgow shows were all sell-outs, testament to the popularity of his dark humour. But fans of the comedian can take a daily, free dose of this dark humour on Limond’s Twitter page, an often controversial and hilarious feed best avoided by the easily outraged.

It would take too much word count to recap all the offence Limond has caused on Twitter but you don’t need to search hard to find it. He doesn’t, however, believe he’s ever gone too far.

He is also quick to defend free speech, when I ask about last week’s court case involving Mark Meechan, the 30-year-old who notoriously trained his girlfriend’s dog to lift a paw in response to anti-Semitic phrases. I can’t give examples of some of Limond’s worse tweets because I doubt they’d make it past the sub-editor but let’s just say they’re fairly boundary shattering.

“Sometimes I worry I’m a psychopath,” Limond says. “I’ve got a sick sense of humour, a dark sense of humour. I do care about things and care about people but there's another side to me. I've maybe crossed a line with other people but not with myself. What I say on Twitter is nothing compared to what's in my head.”

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Another Limmy’s Homemade Show sketch touches on the notion of humour and what different people find acceptable to laugh at. He makes the point that crime and horror authors – he cites Stephen King who “seems to be a nice person in real life” – write horrific things, and that’s acceptable. But when he posts similar on Twitter, as a momentary character, people are appalled.

Does the backlash bother him? And is it stressful, being on Twitter so often, dealing with all the abuse and aggravation of social media?

“I'd actually like to be more controversial. See when it happens enough [backlash], it's a nice calloused type of feeling you get. See if you don't like what I've said then unfollow me.

“Because this is what I'm like and I think I'm an alright person, but I have got this sick side to me and the best thing for you is to go because I'm not going to stop, I can't stop the way I think, this is the way I've always been ever since I was wee."

He stops, starts again: “I sound like I've killed about 10 people. But I think if you don't like it, just unfollow the person. I'm alright with being disliked rather than trying to be perfect, because you get to relax then.”

Limond acknowledges that social media is a different experience for women. “For men there’s not all the sexual shaming side of it. I did have someone once say to me something like ‘I hope your wife and wean dies’. I don't care.

"I don't care because I'm worse than them. They probably think that's an evil thing to say but I think 100 times worse than that in my head. So it doesn't bother me. Sometimes I kind of like it. If someone really goes out of their way to bother me then I know they're unhappy … and that kind of makes me happy.”

Limond might be coming off here as a bit dour and I’m doing him a disservice if so. He is quite sincere in his answers, only once or twice slipping into a character to give a reply, but even when talking about the dark stuff, he sort of … twinkles. As I type that, I can imagine Limond’s response: out comes the Posh Glasgow accent and up goes an eyebrow. “Twinkles.”

Somehow we turn onto the topic of racism and Limond riffs on the frustration he feels at the hypocrisy of not welcoming in asylum seekers and refugees.

He talks about the Carnwadric of his youth and of now, a long riff with a spectacular punchline. “There were lots of families, good families, trying to bring up the weans as best they can. But there was also a lot of stabbings, shootings, people getting full of jellies, looking to wreck the place, vandalising the place, graffiti, putting trolleys in the burn, glue sniffing, everything was wrecked, smashed in.

“It wasn't a complete warzone, just trouble and fighting, everybody fighting, das [dads] fighting, junkies, just that general degradation and ripping the tiles off things. That’s Glasgow, Glasgow's history, gang culture and Glasgow's almost proud of being like that.

"Nobody gave a f**k about it. I know people who grew up where I grew up, they never had one complaint about it. That's just how it was. And I asked them recently, what's it like, how's Carnwadric now?

"And they say ‘It's all went to pot. You've got these asylum seekers now and they're all kind of hanging about.’”

Throughout his comedy back catalogue, Limond uses Glasgow and her inhabitants as backdrops and props. During our interview the city doesn’t disappoint. At this point a woman comes over to our table smiling. Limond grins back. “Oh hi,” he says warmly and I assume she’s a pal.

It quickly becomes clear that they’ve never met. Rather, she’s a fan and has stopped at our table to tell him about her daughter, a great admirer. She says the young girl fell over in the street and was crying but glanced up and, coincidentally, Limond was walking past. “She stopped crying right away.”

The woman asks for a selfie and Limond happily obliges, although not as himself. As the camera appears he affects a pose, does one of his faces. “You’re an inspiration,” she says.

He likes this, Limond says. He hates being stared at or covertly photographed but he loves when people come up for a chat.

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ANOTHER of his handmade sketches is just seconds long but beautifully encapsulates a current social media flaw, that of a coterie of media and academic types chewing over issues using language and acronyms the rest of the population can’t be expected to keep abreast of.

“My issue with all sort of social justice stuff and leftie stuff, and I would put myself on a social justice leftie side, is some of the terminology is jargon. I'm up to speed with this patter but who are you speaking to? Is this just for youse?

"And I feel that way with the Cambridge Analytica. It's alright to do these big exposes but what happens next, how does it make a difference, who are you speaking to when you do these big things? How does it get interpreted? You need something like the Sun, who speaks to the lowest common denominator.”

The BBC press officer refers to Limond as “talent”. Limond is speaking for the working classes but can you be on television with the job title “talent” and still be working class?

It’s a Catch-22, that as soon as a person becomes a television personality they start to slide into the category of middle class. How do you ensure the representation of working-class people in the media when, as soon as we join the trade, we have less claim to be working class?

I suggest there needs to be a reclassification with an extra category or two, but Limond disputes this strongly.

“Naw, naw,” he shakes his head. “Get rid of it all. We don’t need another one. Working class, middle class, get rid of it.”

We’re in a converted church and Limond is in front of a stained-glass window. As his says this, a ray of sunshine beams through and lights up behind his head, like a halo. Glasgow, again, obliging.

Limond adds: “It takes me back to my childhood and I do have a bit of intellectual snobbery about certain ways.

“You have to talk in the language of normal people or why even bother? You're just showing off.”

During the independence referendum Limond was vocal about voting Yes. Despite being described as a cybernat, he was thoughtful online, asking questions, trying to work things out. This time, he says, he would still vote Yes but he would sit back. He’s decided you can’t change people’s minds by “bashing it over” their heads.

Another Homemade sketch riffs on the notion that, throughout history, things have repeatedly “kicked aff". Doesn’t it feel, I ask him, like things should be kicking aff again – Trump, Brexit, March For Our Lives, Black Lives Matter, austerity, Russia … He doesn’t disagree.

“Maybe it's best we get all the nukes and we just blow the whole thing up and be done with it as quickly as possible. It's going to happen eventually in a few billion years when the sun gets too big and burns up anyway, so why not now? While we're right in the middle of the suffering.

"Don't wait until a billion years of suffering. Dae it now. Get it over and done with, quick, painless, humane, and stop fannying about. No hiding away in bunkers. Nobody gets away, not the ants, scorpions, even the rats get it. Nothing survives. No life left so it can't evolve into us again. Never again.”

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I ask if he would feel any guilt about denying Daniel all that might happen to him in his life, should he get to live it. “It would be a shame, it would be a shame, but I'm not selfish, I care about people and I care about humanity and I'd make that sacrifice. Whole thing done. Get it over and done with. Fingers crossed, eh?”

Limond laughs so hard it forces him sideways in his seat, and who else could close with nuclear devastation but be devastatingly funny with it?

Limmy's Homemade Show starts on Thursday, April 5 on BBC 2 Scotland