Sara Pascoe is on a bit of a roll at the moment. She is a TV regular, she is touring the UK and her first book, Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body, has just been published and has been getting great reviews. Ooh look, here's one.

So I thought it was a good time to dust off this interview I did with Pascoe in 2014 for the Evening Standard when she was preparing for her Edinburgh show that went on to pick up a Foster's Comedy Award nomination. It's a great interview with a lot of the ideas that ended up in her book such as her thoughts on sperm selection. Have a read and then buy her book.

Even off-stage, comedian Sara Pascoe knows how to focus attention. We are sitting in her publicist’s garden on a sunny afternoon and she is describing her latest show, Sara Pascoe vs History. “It’s very spermy,” she announces, which is tantalising in anyone’s book.

I need to know more about this straight away. “Well, part of it is about the theory of sperm selection. There is the post-Victorian idea that men are programmed to find lots of women attractive to perpetuate their genetic code and women are programmed to keep one man. But there is also a theory that in ancient times women would have had sex with a lot of men in one evening and the healthiest sperm was the one that got to the egg. There are different kinds of sperm ... even kamikaze sperm with short tails who don’t know what their purpose is.”

The smart, funny, slightly intense 33-year-old is full of the facts she has plucked from a book called Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá for the show she is trying out in London before going to the Edinburgh Fringe next month. She says it’s the conflict between monogamy and fidelity that fascinates her. “My show examines how we are affected by the past and our parents. Human beings are in a battle between what society tells us we should be doing and our instincts. That’s why we hate ourselves.”

It sounds like she hasn’t abandoned her successful blend of philosophy and sardonic humour in this new material, which, from past experience, should be very entertaining. It may be her fifth solo outing but the buzz around the show and Pascoe’s burgeoning TV career point to this being her year. Brace yourself, Edinburgh. Here comes a star.

Her face will already be familiar from BBC’s Twenty Twelve and W1A, in which she played one of the airheads from the PR agency, Perfect Curve. Last month she appeared for the first time on Mock the Week, a beneficiary of the recent policy to include a woman on every BBC panel show. She went down well, especially for her sarcastic suggestion that we should “make Page 3 like jury duty — every woman over 18 has to do it”.

She is very much at the forefront of an exciting group of London-based comedians making inroads into the mainstream with a different, distinctive style of humour. They treat comedy as an art form rather than a branch of showbusiness, yet they are now being embraced by the world of entertainment.

Along with Pascoe, a number of them — Aisling Bea, Bridget Christie, Joe Wilkinson and Tom Rosenthal — are due to appear on this summer’s Saturday night revival of Celebrity Squares on ITV, hosted by Warwick Davis.

Just as the alternative comedy of the Eighties came out of Soho’s Comedy Store, this lot are from London’s comedy fringes, the smaller clubs, such as the Invisible Dot in King’s Cross. “The Invisible Dot uses the term ‘the new wave’ and I guess that’s what we are,” says Pascoe, who also includes Nick Helm, Josie Long and Luisa Omielan in this movement of “post-alternative comedians”.

Interview continues here.