Before she was a TV mainstay, Judi Love was a single mum juggling standup with care work. Now she’s back on stage for a show that finds humour in past trauma: ‘It’s laughter that helped me’, she says.

Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.

She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best. Next, she’s at college, studying IT, but mostly “going into the games room looking for boys”. It’s here that Love meets this unnamed lad.