WHEN Des Clarke describes his formative years growing up in Glasgow, the comedian doesn't hold back on the eye-watering detail.

"I looked hideous," he says. "I was a real weird looking kid: tubby, hairy and the first in my class to get a moustache - I was about five at the time.

"Do you remember the guy in your class who had what was called 'bum fluff' above his upper lip? I was that guy. I had permanent bum fluff all the way through primary school. So I don't think I found comedy - comedy found me.

"I see old photographs of myself and I look like Super Mario. This little fat guy with a tache. People would mistake me for the school janny."

But Clarke isn't done yet. All this reminiscing is clearly picking at the scab of a long festering wound. "I tried for years to get onto the school football team," he continues. "There was only around 100 people in the whole school and 11 in the team. Bearing in mind it was an all-boys team, it should have made it a one in five chance."

He bites back a grin, building to the punch line. "The moment I realised it wasn't going to happen was when I was a substitute, we were getting beat 5-0 and, for the last five minutes, the manager sent a dog on. It was like a dagger to the heart."

The reason for this trip down memory lane is that Clarke is set open an 11-date Scottish tour, The Trouble with Being Des, at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow next weekend, only a stone's throw from the site of the Gorbals tower block where he spent his early childhood.

In some ways, Clarke has come full circle but in others he couldn't be further from where he started. Two decades have passed since he first found his calling as a 12-year-old in a talent show at Holyrood Secondary School on the south side of Glasgow. "My mate and I did daft impressions like Frank Spencer, Prince Charles and all of our teachers," he recalls. "That was the first time I had ever been on a stage. I remember thinking: 'Wow. This is a bit of social acceptance.' It gave me the bug at an early age.

"After that I would get asked to host wee charity events at the school such as fashion shows and the teachers' karaoke. I found that people who would never have given me the time of day before were suddenly interested in this kid with stubble and spiky hair."

When we meet on a rainy Wednesday lunchtime, Clarke is running almost half an hour late. He bursts into the cafe filled with profuse apologies. "I'm so sorry," he says, looking wide-eyed and stricken. "I've been sitting around all morning waiting to do an interview..." He pauses, catching sight of my already half finished coffee. "Err, much like you have yourself ..." he deadpans.

Which isn't bad as ice-breakers go. Lightning quick on the draw with one-liners and dry, witty observations, Clarke has a knack of turning most things into a joke - an occupational hazard one imagines - but scratch beneath the surface and he comes across as bright, articulate and keen to be taken seriously. It's a stark contrast to the daft laddie persona he more typically purveys.

Clarke did his first stand-up gig at 19 and it was then, he professes, there came the transition between "awkward kid and guy who could sort of do this." His big break arrived at 22 when he landed a presenting job on ITV Saturday morning children's show SM:TV Live, following in the footsteps of Ant and Dec, and er, Claire and H from Steps.

In Scottish terms, Clarke has gone on to enjoy a raft of success. He is the cheeky chappy who hosted the 2014 Commonwealth Games closing ceremony, pops up perennially in panto and whose laughter fills the airwaves each morning on the Capital FM Scotland breakfast show. Most recently he has been keeping the crowds entertained with his distinctive banter during RBS 6 Nations matches at Murrayfield.

Yet Clarke finds himself at something of a crossroads. He's torn between knowing when he's onto a good thing - he could make a killing on the after-dinner circuit any night of the week - and ploughing a new furrow in order to fulfil the dream he has held since childhood: to be known as a stand-up comedian.

"I think the perception is, because I have had success with other things, that I had stopped doing stand-up," he says. "People would say to me: 'Oh, I see you're back gigging' or ask: 'When did you start doing stand-up?' I think: 'I've being doing this since I was 19!'"

His tone is light but the exasperation is palpable. "I feel annoyed and frustrated when people say that. Stand-up is the constant. It's all I ever wanted to do. I think my problem is I've become known as a jack-of-all-trades.

"Presenting is a lot more visible. If you do something on the telly, a million people could see it. In stand-up it is to rooms of 100 or 200 people. You would need to gig for many lifetimes to hit the same audience [numbers] as telly."

At the ripe old age of 34, Clarke has decided it's time to redress that balance. While he won't be hanging up his presenting mic or turning his back on panto any time soon, he has earmarked 2015 as the year he hopes to make the world of comedy sit-up and take notice.

Certainly the stakes are a lot higher than 15 years ago when Clarke made his debut. One only has to look at the prodigious rise of fellow Glasgow comedy circuit alumnus Kevin Bridges - worth a reported £4.2million with a vast global following besides successful book and DVD deals - to see it's a tempting carrot.

Clarke would be the first to admit he wouldn't mind a bit of that action. "Absolutely," he says. "If people say they don't want that, they are talking pish.

"We've had some great comedians come out of Glasgow in the last few years and a lot on the circuit that are ready to break out. I would like to think I'm one of them. This is me trying to focus more of the spotlight onto that side of what I do. I'm not saying it's going to happen overnight, but I hope it will start a journey for me where more people will begin to think of me as a comedian."

His aspirations have been bolstered by a sold-out, 25-date run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last August. Clarke credits that success in part to his boosted public profile after hosting the Glasgow 2014 closing ceremony.

"Sales had been going well but off the back of the Games they went like that" - he mimics an ascending rocket with his hand - "off the scale. I'm sure a lot of people who came along, having seen me doing the closing ceremony, were probably thinking: 'Who is this guy? I've seen him pointing to Kylie and speaking to a Ugandan athlete.' It was the best Fringe run I've done."

His latest tour is an extended set from that show seeing Clarke lay bare his foibles and shortcomings. He admits it's a theme he was never comfortable with in his younger years.

"For a long time in my career I was always talking about other things," he says. "Without being too psychological, I wasn't ever really talking about me. It was a big part of my material I missed. I would make observations about what is going on in the world, things I saw on the telly or big stories, but if I was lying on the psychologist's couch I would say" - he adopts posh, patronising tones - "'Well Des, you are projecting outwards, but you are not really looking inside yourself.'"

Clarke appears pensive when asked why that was the case. "I came from a background where you just didn't talk about yourself," he says. "There was that attitude of 'what happens in the hoose, stays in the hoose'. It was a bit like North Korea. Growing up it was always keep yourself to yourself, keep your head down and don't make trouble. I suppose that must have still been in my mind. I just felt more comfortable talking about other things."

It was only in recent years when he started to reflect on his childhood growing up in the Gorbals that Clarke realised he was sitting on a mine of material. "I realised there is loads I had forgotten. I had banked it all away." Banked or buried? Clarke looks coy. "Buried. It was completely hidden away within my inner psychosis. But now I feel it's banked and I'm cashing out on it."

These days Clarke and his girlfriend Deborah, 34, a psychology student (appropriately), live on the Clydeside in Glasgow but he remains fiercely proud of his Gorbals roots. "I have a picture of the flats where I grew up on the wall of my current house," he says.

Clarke is the youngest of two children. His father Dermot was a bricklayer by trade who ran his own company, while mother Ann helped out with the business. "My dad did proper, manual work," he says. "He is a grafter. People tell me I'm hard-working and I definitely get that from my parents."

The flat Clarke grew up in was demolished a few years ago as part of Glasgow's urban and social regeneration. "I know," he says, rolling his eyes in mock outrage. "Where do they put the blue plaque?"

He acknowledges it was a tough area but insists he only has happy memories of childhood afternoons spent gazing out of the window on the 21st floor and watching the trains flit back and forth at Central Station.

"I never had any bother," he says. "Outsiders coming in, maybe, but I would be making it up to say I saw much trouble. There were certain things. I vividly remember the smell of vinegar in the back stairs. It was what the junkies used for [cleaning] their needles but I didn't know that then. I always thought: 'Wow, these guys are having fish and chips every night and remaining remarkably thin.'

"You would see needles on the ground, you would see fights but I was never really involved. I learned to avoid trouble. I'm quite perceptive now because of that and I can generally see trouble before it happens."

His forthcoming show may be the first step in his grand plan for world domination but Clarke already has a taste for the big arena tour life.

"I've been lucky enough to do warm-up in the Hydro - three different gigs," he says. "One was warming-up for Nicki Minaj at the MTV EMA awards. I'm trying to get her to warm-up for me at the Citizens Theatre but no call back yet - the campaign continues.

"I had to go out and gee everyone up before Nicki Minaj came on. I played the Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) and afterwards one of her guys came up and asked: 'What's that song?' He said he noticed I had something going on with the audience.

"I told him what it was called, he looked it up and Nicki Minaj ended up using it as part of her presenting. So, I feel I've contributed to Nicki Minaj's career."

But if you're looking for wild tales of debauchery from the after party, Clarke isn't your man. As the great and good were swinging from the chandeliers in Glasgow following the MTV EMAs last November, he was already home and in his PJs.

"I'm rubbish and a terrible networker," he admits. "I should have gone to the after party but I thought: 'I just want my bed.' Here's the thing: Bono isn't waiting for a taxi at 3am, David Hasselhoff isn't catching the night bus. Unless a party is quite near my house, I'm not interested. That's why the Hydro was ideal because I could walk home afterwards along the Clyde. I'm not one for hanging about. I just feel I've done my bit, that's me away up the road."

Although to be fair, Clarke has to be up with the larks most days. Over the past six-and-a-half years he has become adept at skipping out of bed at 4.30am to host the Capital FM Scotland breakfast show. "I've found I don't need much sleep. I'm like Thatcher, four hours will do me. Although that's the only similarity with Thatcher, I should add."

He's not a fan of the afternoon disco nap. "I think I have lived for most of my life on pure adrenalin," says Clarke. "I should get into the siesta lifestyle but I have too much carry-on in my head to go to sleep in the afternoon. I might miss something, I'm too nosy."

In the pipeline is a six-part comedy series for BBC Radio Scotland, Des Clarke Exposed, which will air this summer.

"It's about peeling the layers away and hopefully maturing as a performer," he says. "I've been doing stand-up comedy for 15 years now but for a lot of people out there I'll be new to them. I could be the most experienced newcomer in comedy history - that's my angle. It's like a rebirth for me."

The Trouble with Being Des will open at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, on March 28 before touring Scotland until June 5. For more information, visit desclarke.com