IT was while he was still lying on the road on a stretcher high above Los Angeles, having just been cut from his car after a head-on collision, that the thought first occurred to Jim Tavare.

“I had this out-of-body moment looking down on myself from above and my bones were all sticking out and my arm was hanging off,” he recalls, “and I thought: ‘There’s definitely a show in this somewhere,” he says.

“And at least I won’t have to do my double bass act anymore.’”

July 2018, less than a month before he travels to Edinburgh to do that show at this year’s Free Fringe, and Tavare, who has been living in Los Angeles for the last nine years, is sitting in his mother-in-law’s house in the East Midlands.

He is not the man he was. He’d be the first to tell you. The comedian much loved by Prince Charles, turned up in Harry Potter movies and was never seen on a stage without tux or double bass is in a different place these days. Life-endangering, life-changing accidents will do that to you.

In March last year he went out to buy some chicken wire to make a chicken coop for his LA home. On the way back, the Sat Nav suggested a quicker route home and he decided to follow it. It took him onto the beautiful but dangerous Angeles Crest Highway.

“People have gone off the edge and they’ve found them four days later alive at the bottom,” Tavare explains. “It’s that kind of road.”

He didn’t go off the edge but at two o’clock in the afternoon he was involved in a head-on collision on a blind corner. It took an hour and a half to cut him from the wreckage. The car had been reduced to a “cube,” he says, and it had a five-ton truck sitting on top of it. “It looked like a rhinoceros on a warthog,” Tavare suggests.

Tavares’s dog was in the car with him but somehow wasn’t hurt. In fact, no one was hurt but the comedian.

But he was hurt enough. More than enough.

He was lifted by helicopter to intensive care where he was quickly given two blood transfusions. He had suffered 30 broken bones, even more fractures. His femur was broken in four places. “It’s supposed to be the strongest bone in the body,” he points out. “It can’t be that strong.”

Other bones broken included most of his ribs, his sternum, his shoulder blade and his neck.

“The neck was the thing they were worried about, but then that turned into a minor thing,” he says now.

It was the collapse of his lungs after they were punctured that was the worst injury, he says. That and the internal bleeding which meant operating was difficult

There was other damage that was minor in the scheme of things, he says. His toes were all “hammered in” on his bad leg. He’s had abdominal damage and a wrist fusion which means he can’t play the bass any more.

But it’s the lungs he worries about. “The thing that scares me is I’ve only got one lung effectively. It’s like an engine falling off an aeroplane. You can still get to the airport …”

The fact that he survived at all was something of a miracle. Maybe it helped that he had kept himself fit down the years. “I’ve always been into walking and running and stuff. I can’t do any of that now, but it helped me survive. They said my heart was really good because it was at 200 beats per minute a lot of the time and that is because they couldn’t get the pain control right.”

Every time his body came out of sedation it would start to panic, he says.

But the accident and its immediate aftermath are only the first part of the story. For the next 18 months he was stuck in his bed, being cared for by his wife Laura, while he came to terms with what happened to him, fighting depression and the physical and mental scars he’d picked up because of going out to buy some chicken wire.

“I was constantly thinking about just blowing my brains out all the time and not being there because it would be such a relief.”

That’s a hard thing to hear, I tell him. “I don’t think I have any fear of death,” he says. “I don’t think it’s so bad because you’re suddenly not there. It’s actually not really a bad thing.”

Still, at some point the idea of turning this experience into a show resurfaced and it became something for him to hold onto.

“It saved my life doing this project,” he says.

“It really did lift my spirits. If I hadn’t had [the idea of] the show I wouldn’t have had anything else.”

Well, the show and medical marijuana which helped him get eight hours sleep at night. “I was able to just pass out at difficult times.”

Tavare has no memory of the crash at all. “I’m terrified that it’s all going to come flooding back in the middle of a job interview,” he says, half-joking, but only half.

And, in some ways, that is what he is finding so exciting about telling his story at Edinburgh. It’s not about the jokes. It’s about the story. The humour, he hopes, will come from it.

“I have the duty of service to make a project which is amusing but with poignancy. I’ve not had that before.”

It is, to be fair, an extreme way to reinvent yourself. But he has been reinvented. He hopes his Edinburgh show will demonstrate that he’s a different performer, both physically (because, frankly, he is not the same man he was) and comedically.

And, although the answer seems obvious, a very different man?

“Most definitely. I take life as a privilege, not a gimme for a start. I’m never bored. I’m very frustrated to not to be able to walk properly. It’s annoying having a restriction on your breathing but that’s the next thing to get used to.”

Tavare has been coming to the Fringe since 1989. He won’t be climbing Arthur’s Seat this year, nor staying out late (tiredness is a constant problem: “I’m just going to bed at eight o’clock every night to get through it.”)

But this year is a new beginning of sorts. And a wake-up call.

“This could happen to any of us. We’re all just trying not to have an accident every day.”

Jim Tavare: From Deadpan to Bedpan is at the Laughing Horse @ The Counting House – The Ballroom as part of the Edinburgh Free Fringe until August 26 (except August 13).