Let us be clear. Grayson Perry does not do stand up.
"I did this lecture at the Southbank and Sandi Toksvig said to me, 'You should do stand up'. I don't call it stand up though. I'm not one of these people that stands over the mic and tries to get a laugh every 15 seconds," he tells me, seated in his Islington studio, a tatty desk and a couple of steaming mugs of instant coffee between us. "I do go for the laughs though. Definitely."
The laughs, if his conversation is anything to go by, are plenty in his latest project, his fourth touring one-man show, which lands at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London next Tuesday. Grayson Perry: A Show All About You sounds, from his description, like part-musical comedy, part-TED talk, part-twitter-baiting nightmare.
"It's got songs. It's got audience interaction. I make them download an app so I can ask them a question and they can vote on things and send word clouds onto a screen. We do quiz as well, and ask them to put their hands up, because I like that, it's really quick. And it's about identity, which is, you know, a topic that nobody seems to think about these days," he says. And laughs.
Audiences have so far been appreciative – "I got a standing ovation in Aberdeen" – despite essentially being the butt of the joke. "I tease the audience, basically. Because I know who they are," he says. "I've polled them on previous tours, so I know exactly who they are: they're the kind of well-educated left-leaning middle classes, as you would expect. So I make them suffer for that."
The show explores the different facets of our social identity – class and income, how you vote, gender. He also talks about the impact of the subconscious. "I'm interested in therapy and the brain. So I go into, not the science because you know, I'm a Wikipedia-level academic, but the part played by the unconscious. And then I do a bit of autobiographical stuff, as a kind of case study, using what they call lived experience, which means you can get away with any old shit."
Politics is a big part of it. "I always ask them: 'would you vote for proportional representation?' Interestingly, my audience, 85 per cent, 90 per cent say yes. Because they're grownups. They're not into the bickering polarisation that characterises our British political system."
All his work could, perhaps be described as political, from his pots to his tapestries, his TV documentaries and even Grayson's Art Club, that aims to get anyone and everyone indoctrinated into the joy and satisfaction of making.
"I deal with social issues. But I'm not setting out to preach. If I'm making a piece, I'm more likely to mock. Someone said to me the other day, 'I don't think I could tell which way you voted from your show.' I thought, 'That's good. That's interesting.'"
I ask if he's looking forward to the forthcoming election. "I think for the sheer car-crash drama. It will be like going down the motorway going, 'Ooooh, look.'"
Does he think regime change is inevitable?
"We think that don't we? But if modern times have shown us anything, it's that things can change really quickly. Look what's happening in Netherlands, where you get some weird outsider that comes along. British politics is ripe for somebody that picks and chooses out of the philosophical and political positions. But the British people are naturally suspicious of new political parties, so I don't know."
He agrees with another recent interviewee of mine, Antony Gormley, that the two top parties are now rather old fashioned, and mapped on to modern society, they don't quite fit.
"No, they don't at all. I mean, the Labour Party – and in my show, I talk about this – it's the party of people who have been to university now. A lot of the towns I tour round, the biggest industry is the university. I call them the mills of the 21st century," he laughs.
'The Labour Party is the party of people who've been to university now'
He has been supportive of Keir Starmer though, and was a signatory of a letter supporting the Labour leader's pledge to reprioritise creativity and creative skills.
"I think it's something we do well in this country. There's something in our national character that makes good artists and creative people. Because we're questioning, and we like a laugh. People come here to pick up our vibe," he says.
He feels strongly that the arts should receive government support. He's conscious that the "mixed ecology" of public and private should continue to exist, but he's scathing about the decimation of humanities in schools.
"Education is being stripped right back. There's a sort of instrumentalist idea, that we're just gonna supply nerds to the computer industry, or biosciences, and the soft power, and the 'why are we f***ing alive in the first place?' sort of questions don't seem to occur."
He thinks that most people in Britain aren't engaged with the arts (he uses the example of TV quizzes – when an arts question comes up, "no-one ever gets it right").
"That's why I like the demotic stuff like telly and musicals," he says, "to bring people into it". Of course, he is developing a musical, a fictionalised account of his life, with Jerry Springer: the Opera's Richard Thomas. They have more than a dozen songs already. I recommend he see The Witches at the National, as it strikes me he'd like it, and he seems interested.
"I try to go to as many musical as I can, to check out the opposition. Whenever I enter an art form, I am always interested in doing the typical thing. I'm not an innovator. I'm not a ceramicist, I'm a potter, you know? If I do a print, I do a traditional form. I'm not there to push the boundaries and roll around on the floor. So Seventies."
He won't be in it. "God no. I can sing but I'm not that good." They're aiming to open in 2025.
The "autobiographical stuff" that informs both his show and the music is pretty bleak. Perry's father left when Perry was aged four, after discovering that his wife had become pregnant by the milkman. She later married her lover, who was violent, and eventually became estranged from her son. Perry's father rejected him after discovering his cross-dressing. The artist has spoken about how his parental issues coloured his relationship with early dealers of his work before he went into therapy.
He wasn't especially exposed to art growing up, and didn't aim to become an artist. "I was just making stuff. And I just followed the pathway [on which] I could carry on making stuff." He didn't even think of being an artist when he went to art college, he says. "I just liked doing it. If the tutor had said to me, 'Oh, you're a fashion designer', I'd have ended up a fashion designer. But he said, 'You're a fine artist'. And I've never questioned it."
He doesn't think he "could have named you a contemporary artist when I went to art college. A British one anyway. Maybe David Hockney." Now a household name himself, he thinks that era that began with the YBAs, of people knowing about contemporary artists, has passed.
"I don't quite understand what happened. The Turner Prize used to be a front page thing for days." He thinks that, possibly in reaction to the fuss around the YBAs, others have "almost avoided publicity in the years after. Then we had all the collectives and the activist artists, so the 'genius' thing maybe didn't appeal." He puts on a floaty voice. "I'm just going to save the world."
There is a lot of that about right now. "Yes, and my feeling about it is if you're going to do activism, do it somewhere where it makes a difference, because every single person that ever sets foot in an art gallery is probably going to agree with you," he says. "You are truly preaching to the converted if you're making contemporary art about progressive issues."
It's true that anyone who commits to watching a 40 minute video work about climate change probably doesn't need to see it to know it's a problem. "No. In fact, you've wasted their time, when they could be out there saving the planet."
I saw him most recently at the British Museum Trustees' Dinner; he left the board earlier this year. He says they only found out about the thefts at his last board meeting, though he doesn't know how long the senior management were aware of the problem. He is robustly supportive of the museum though.
"Long before I joined there were people doing sort of anti-colonialism tours of the museum. All those issues that people throw at the British Museum, I can assure you, the staff [there] have been thinking about it a lot f***ing longer than you. They're very aware of all the issues, but of course, they haven't got the money. Give them a billion quid and they'll sort it out."
The next director has a job on his or her hands though. "They've got to be a good communicator. Their job is a figurehead. Hartwig [Fischer, the last director] was a lovely guy. But he wasn't [his charismatic predecessor] Neil McGregor. And Neil had his faults, but he was a brilliant communicator, and got the public on board. And therefore you can get the politicians on board, and then you can do things.
"So we need someone who can tell the story with passion, to realise what a fantastic gem we've got. With all its compromises and history and difficulties and to explain them clearly and concisely. So the public goes, yeah, fair enough, and then support the thing."
He's frustrated by the "it's all loot" brigade. "There's a few celebrity objects that are contested, but most of the stuff, nobody knows, and nobody wants it. Nobody's ever asked for it. When I first joined, I think at my first meeting, it was asked, how many [restitution] requests have there been? I think it was something like eight in the last 20 years, it was shockingly few."
'All those issues people throw at the British Museum, I can assure you, the staff there have been thinking about it a lot f***ing longer than you'
And the issue is more nuanced than most people give it credit for, he says. "For instance, people come from traditional societies to look at the objects. And they're always shocked, because they've never seen those objects preserved before. Because in their natural habitat, so to speak, they would have all rotted away or been trashed, or whatever.
"There are all sorts of arguments, it's complicated, and [the museum is] totally aware of it. But it's an old institution. A big, old, skilful institution."
Our time is up, our photographer is waiting. Sir Grayson Perry, knight of the realm, in his holey blue t-shirt covered in ceramic dust, shuffles off to present himself to his public.
