A SELF-PROFESSED nerd, Tom Livingstone spends his spare time with comic books, fantasy fiction, computer games and dorky movies. Not that he has a great deal of spare time as The Noise Next Door are on tour with their new show Remix and arrive at Lighthouse, Poole tonight.

What can we expect tonight? Laughs. Most of all we want to make our audience laugh. We don’t have a big message, we don’t do this to get across an agenda, we just want everyone to have a good time. How do we do that? Well, we take suggestions from our audience and transform them into songs, scenes and jokes right before your very eyes, and we’re pretty good at it according to audiences, the national press and our mums.

How did the Remix show come about?

Remix is a very exciting show for us. It is packed full of brand new games and frameworks for improvising and we have built the show to be as versatile and hilarious as humanly possible. It’s a different experience every night… But it’s always very, very funny.

What do you need from the audience to get the show going? Throughout the show we will ask the audience for suggestions for each scene or song. Sometimes we might even get someone up on stage to help. But we don’t want to bully our audience. It’s all about everybody having fun. Rules?! Absolutely not. Anything goes. We get all sorts of amazing suggestions from our audiences and they surprise us on a nightly basis! We once asked for a household object and a very calm man in his 50s quickly replied: ‘A Viking longboat’.

What’s the funniest thing that has happened to you on the road? Now you’re asking! I’m incredibly lucky to travel around the country with my three best mates. Every night we get to make an audience laugh, and every day we can’t help but make each other laugh. As with most groups of friends it’s when one of us messes up that makes the others laugh the most. I recently fell in a stream in the middle of lengthy explanation of how good my balance is. I still haven’t lived that one down.

What’s your connection to this part of the world? I was born in Devon, went to school in Dorset [The Woodroffe School, Lyme Regis], and my wife is from Somerset. I actually had family friends in Poole growing up and recall many trips to Splashdown water park, one very windy walk at Sandbanks and my first ever live football match watching AFC Bournemouth getting drubbed by Cardiff City.

How did you start in comedy – were you the classic class clown at school? Sam and Robin were certainly class clowns growing up. At school I was a classic nerd. I came to comedy through a love of word-play, story, character and the fact that I really didn’t want a proper job.

I started improvising with the rest of the guys at university and when we graduated we headed to the Edinburgh Fringe with our first show. Over the years, things went from strength to strength. Now we are on our fifth national tour, we’ve been on telly, and we still get to do what we love for a job!