FORGET James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt – there’s a new spy in town. And he’s not dressed in a neat tuxedo or head-to-toe camouflage. He’s wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt.

That’s right, Milton Jones – ‘Mock the Week’s resident oddball, Radio 4 regular and king of the surreal one-liner – is back on tour, and this time he’s an international man of mystery.

The wild-haired joke-teller might not be the obvious choice for a secret agent, but in ‘Milton: Impossible’ the 55-year-old comic will be taking his audience through an action-packed story via hundreds of his trademark, exquisitely-crafted pieces of wordplay.

Milton is bringing the show to The Hexagon in Reading on November 14.

But where did he get the inspiration for the show’s name from?

“Basically, I came up with the title before the show! I thought: “That sounds good!” So I made a rod for my own back by theming it.

“But sometimes it’s easier to write to a theme than have a completely blank page.

“The show is based on Mission: Impossible, but Mission: Impossible has a huge budget and lots of special effects.

“My show is just me and some hats and about 250 jokes. It’s low-tech instead of high-tech.”

Although Milton is the king of one-liners, his shows do have a narrative element to it.

He said: “If you’re going to do a show for over an hour you can’t just tell bits. That’s what I do on Mock the Week and Live at the Apollo, which is fine, but you want something with the veneer of satisfaction, otherwise it’s too fragmented.

“This show’s got an interrogation scene, a car chase with a swivel chair, and I end up escaping on top of a Vince Cable Car. It’s not strictly realistic, but it’s as daft as ever.”

The thing about one-liners is that often, Milton ends up writing too many jokes to fit in one show.

He said: “There are about 250 jokes in the show, but I reckon I end up writing about 350.

“A lot of them are then used somewhere else – in the next tour, on radio, on Mock the Week – so they’re never wasted.

“And if they’re particularly brilliant then I might go out of my way to include them in the show.”

So, from an expert’s perspective - what makes the perfect joke?

“If a gag works, it makes a cartoon in someone’s head – a very brief picture where they think they know where it’s going, and then you pull the carpet from under them and it was all about something else all along.

“It’s reverse engineering from an idea or a phrase.”

Get your tickets for Milton Impossible at The Hexagon in Reading on November 14 online now at www.whatsonreading.com/hexagon.

Tickets are £29.50 and the show starts at 7.30pm.