Tickets for Daniel Kitson’s six December dates at the Battersea Arts Centre went on sale at noon today and immediately sold out. The venue's online booking system struggled to keep up with the sheer volume of enquiries. All 3240 £12 tickets for the performances in the Grand Hall from December 1 - 6 were sold. The box office staff manning the phones also battled to deal with telephone bookings.

This is not the first time demand for Kitson has outstripped supply. In 2010 the National Thetare box office system crashed when tickets went on sale for It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later.

Details of the show are still sketchy, but A Show For Christmas looks like being a return to something closer to a stand-up work after Kitson’s recent theatrical pieces. The award-winning comedian does not employ a publicist to issue press releases about his new projects, but this is what he has said about the show on the BAC website.

“In the winter of 1998 I was in my early twenties, living alone in London, and just beginning to get paid work as a comedian. I had spent, maybe a year, performing for food, evading train fares and surviving largely on the kindness of my parents.

So, to me, for a while the Christmas party season seemed absolutely incredible.

Come December, the bigger comedy clubs in London (block booked by office parties and charging maybe three times the usual admission) would pay comedians double the customary weekend rate and the gigs – drunken, messy, giddyingly lucrative - ran all week for the entire month – sometimes twice a night.

At that time, my then agent booked what was a rowdy, demanding club in Shoreditch and I found myself fast tracked with unwarranted velocity to the role of compere. I could not believe my luck - back then, twenty two years old, desperate to get better, stage time was all I wanted, and this particular type of stage time – high status crowd control, the management of rowdy rooms rammed with volatile, conflicting energy and the intermittent dodging of cracker toys, thrown by an office manager – felt like an utterly exhilarating place to be. I felt like I was being toughened by it, like I was getting harder and faster and better and that somehow, something important was being forged in that cold fire of drunken disinterest.

And maybe it was. I don’t know.

But over time, over years, I found it harder and harder to find glory in the battle. I took less and less pleasure in the collective drunken lunacy, the parade of paper hats, the bulk bought crackers and in wrangling this orgy of c***s to cheer at the right time. I could feel my delight dwindling, overcome with a burgeoning disdain for everyone involved, myself included. I was just starting to build an audience of my own and I didn’t want them to come there and see me like that.  I didn’t want to be there, being like that.

So I stopped.

Now, this show isn’t actually about any of that but it serves to explain my surprise when, in late spring of 2014, Shelley from Battersea Arts Centre asked if I wanted to make a Christmas Show and I found myself thinking: -

Yes, oddly, I really do.

I may wear a costume and there might be snow in it.”