I’d be very hypocritical if I used their facilities when I won’t do medical charity benefits.” He remains relentlessly upbeat even though the disease has a pretty gloomy prognosis “The most I look at in advance is a year. When he discovered that his back support group was a charity he didn’t go back. “They’re no different – all they did is give Pickfords a job for the day.”These principles are taken to what you might consider the point of foolishness. He won’t speak to any Murdoch-owned newspapers and is unimpressed by the current Labour government. I had an E1 postcode so TV wasn’t best interested.”That appearance prompted one viewer to fire off a letter to a newspaper about him, thinking Lee was yet another one off the Oxbridge production line “I wasn’t flattered at all,” he says wrinkling his nose “I was offended. I only had four jokes and they were really crap but I told the first one and got a huge laugh I couldn’t believe it. A female comic looks up to the next rung and there’s nobody there.

It means there aren’t that many women who can appear on a show like TTIAO,” says Lee.Lee never set out to be a comic. After school he went through a stint as a BT telephone engineer, some time at a building society and then after working for the DHSS spent two years collecting his weekly income from them.His first gig was at the Donmar Warehouse “I’d never heard of it. Mum would get me trousers at Christmas and when she asked me what ones I liked best I’d look at the price tag and always say the cheap ones.” At the local grammar he and his mates used to read Goon Show scripts at breaktime. He was brought up in the East End, his father was a docker, and Lee shared a bedroom with his elder sister until he was 11 “We never starved but money was tight. “There’ s this huge gap that’s appeared on the women’s circuit. I don’t, if only because rarely does a female guest get asked on to discuss the great passes of our time.

So much so he apparently often fails to recognise the guest footballers they have on the programme. “I’m gobbing off on the programme because that’s the nature of the show.” Indeed it is. Which means that if you find the spectacle of six men engaging in a testosterone love-in then you’re obviously one of the millions of viewers who appreciate its laddy bonhomie, puerile schoolboy double entendres and footie highlights. At 35 he has never been married and seems cheerfully resigned to being what he terms a “transitional male”. “Over the years I’ve met women and then when I’ve cheered them up they go. Once you show any vulnerability that’s not what they were there for.”In fact the New Lads would have an impossible task recruiting him. My embarrassed and tearful greeting is not some conniving pre-planned strategy, but if the male response to a weeping female is a reliable yardstick of character Lee acquits himself admirably.

He doesn’t drink, giggles rather than guffaws and doesn’t like football. Cradling his coffee he says all the right things and he really isn’t very macho at all. Eleven years ago Hurst was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative back condition and today is a bad day It’s taken him 20 minutes to walk a five-minute journey. “The pain has gone up in the last year,” he says matter of factly. “But I didn’t want to take a cab ‘cos that would have been a sign of defeat.