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LAMBOYANT and eccentric, Tom Allen has made a career out of his unique style of sharp, acerbic wit, hosting shows including The Apprentice: You’re Fired and The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice with Jo Brand, and enjoying sell-out stand-up tours.

“I like to celebrate the peculiar and I like to celebrate the eccentric,” he declares, traits which are often explored in his stand-up comedy, enhanced by his quirky dress sense.

Tom, 37, speaks with a cut-glass accent but freely admits he has no idea where that came from, being the son of a coach driver in a working class family in Bromley, Kent, and having gone to an unremarkable comprehensive.

Once the youngest member of the Noel Coward Society, being an outsider has drawn him to comedy, though.

“I have found with stand-up that the more I lean into the times I felt embarrassed or awkward or an oddball, the more I have found that audiences respond to it,” he says. “Fundamentally, we all feel like outsiders and feel sad at times and we all feel an existential sense of who we are.”

While humour is never far from his lips, for much of his life he was plagued with shame, predominantly about being gay, which for years he tried to hide behind the eccentric behaviour which has become the calling card of his comedy, the Victorian clothing he favours and his pedantic tidiness (particularly at parties).

“I feared that people would make fun of me if I used a big word or if I held my hands in a certain way or I did button up my blazer. If I was clearing up at a party I wasn’t able to do it with a great sense of joy.

“Now, I would be like, ‘This is the party, I’ve just tidied up! Let’s have a canape workshop!’ Now I can celebrate this eccentricity.”

For many years, shame and self-loathing engulfed him, he admits in his autobiography, No Shame, as he endeavoured to stay under the radar of the school bullies who tormented him, tried to navigate online dating and finally came out to his parents when he was in his 20s.

He didn’t help himself, though. As a teenager he’d wear suits and waistcoats, and even carried a briefcase and a long umbrella to school, which he used as a walking cane. Sometimes he wore a bow tie. It was all a magnet for the bullies. The book is in turns extremely funny and achingly sad, as Tom charts a catalogue of self-loathing and unhappiness which he endured