Robin Ince

Since Robin Ince's first solo Fringe show in 2004 this perpetual motion polymath has embedded himself as a cult festival fixture.

This is partly due to the renown of his innovative club nights and tours, many of which have graced the Fringe, including The Book Club, The School For Gifted Children, atheist extravaganza Nine Lessons and Carols For Godless People and most recently the science happening that was the Uncaged Monkeys tour with Brian Cox – but it's also down to his aptitude for juggling more than one show during the Fringe run.

This year the youthful 42-year-old will be bringing four shows to the Fringe and you'd be wise to see at least one, as 2011 will be his last Edinburgh outing for a little while. Or so he says.

“People say that I am always moaning that each Fringe is my last, but, actually, once I rejected the big business side of it and went to the Free Fringe and The Stand, I have enjoyed doing it. However, next year my son will be going to school and I doubt he'll want to spend a large part of his summer holiday with an increasingly paranoid self-loathing father. So this is my last one until 2015 and that's why I am doing four shows; I'm doing the ones for 2011, '12, '13 and '14 too.”

Unsurprisingly, Ince feels that he is “the least prepared” he has been for years, mainly because most of what he has been working on, reprising The Book Club for festivals or the big Uncaged Monkeys tour, has been of “no use” to his Edinburgh shows.

“I've moved away from standup as such, and I see this as my comedy drama period, so named after what they call TV shows that are neither funny enough or dramatic enough.”

While self-deprecating about his efforts he is, perhaps, more on the money when he criticises himself for "not being able to finish a show on time", which is why he's ended up with a quartet this time round, to spread the load. As well as a lunchtime science show, with guests, and then an hour “shouting loudly with Michael Legge”—both of which he has done before—Ince will be presenting Star Corpse Apple Child (the title of which will be explained at the end of the run) and Robin Ince's Struggle for Existence.

While the last of these is a philosophical journey around things in life that become pointless and can be discarded, Star Corpse Apple Child will, says Ince, ask “if you can you reject mysticism, magic and religious coping mechanisms and still find happiness knowing you have a finite existence.”

He adds cheekily: “I think it is going to be quite a jolly show.”

Jolly - and informative too, no doubt. Many of Ince's shows are, after all, packed full of references to books, ranging from the naff tomes he lampooned on Book Club to weightier works referenced in his solo shows.

It is, then, all about the books and, when we start to pick at the meat of the Fringe shows that will inevitably deal with the tension between religion and science, Ince pushes the point: “I sometimes feel like having - 'do the fucking reading' tattooed on my back. You can often get stuck on an argument that someone only had to read one small pamphlet to know that it's wrong."

Bombastic, maybe, but Ince emphasises that his is not a militant stance: "I am passionate about reading and learning, and asking questions. That is my atheistic messianic zeal. If I was a militant atheist then I am rubbish at it; I did the Greenbelt Christian festival last year and a Christian comedy club recently, and I had nothing strapped to my body for either of those events."

The only thing Ince is likely to have strapped to him is a couple of phones, since his thirst for knowledge often means he is tapping up his fellow uncaged monkeys for answers: "I regularly phone up Brian [Cox], Simon [Singh] and Ben [Goldacre] and ask, without any preamble, something like 'Right, if I am travelling at 100mph going around the world and a friend of mine is cycling around the world at 3mph, every time we pass, at what point will we notice that is now a disparity in our age due to the nature of time?' "

It's inevitable that Ince's audiences won't always be as curious as the comedian himself and in the politest way possible Ince is unapologetic about this.

“When I started there was so much cynical standup and so much derision about anything that is passionate. Now I am lucky enough to be able to put on shows with people who I would pay to see, and work with comics who are not driven by ideas and not money, even if this means that we'll sometimes fail in front of audiences.”