At first glance, you might mistake Dara O Briain's Tickling The English as the diary of a stand-up comedian going on tour around the UK. And it's clear fairly soon that it's the journey from town to town that's glued things together. Yet in much the same way that Frank Skinner's Frank Skinner On The Road: Love, Stand-Up Comedy And The Queen Of The Night book last year turned out to be more about its author and his thoughts than the tour itself, O Briain uses the journey from town to town as a framework from which to explore the English, and the English perception of life.

And it's a fascinating journey, albeit one that looks like it was planned by an evil robot satnav. As O Briain notes, the journey the tour takes rarely seems to follow any kind of logical pattern, short of seemingly to follow Ken Dodd at 50 paces (which makes for a quite brilliant segment near the very end of the book, probably my favourite passage within it). If Michael Palin made a travelogue of Britain, you can be damn sure he'd be buying a better map than the one seemingly used to plan this tour out.

The core of the book, though, is the author's take on the Britain he sees around him. Like a human witty-pedia, O Briain takes as much delight in examining the minutiae of a particular place, and dissecting why some material works better in some places than others (Sheffield certainly sounds like a tough gig). He then evolves this, though, by poking holes in the very way that the English look at themselves. Why are they so unhappy? Why is there so much moaning going on? Should the whole place simply cheer up? And eventually, through a collection of well-chosen facts, good research, compelling arguments and skilful writing, he gradually debunks many of the myths about English life (and not just trivial ones either), before eventually arriving at a conclusion of sorts that ties everything together very well.

It's a clever combination. There's genuine meat here, wrapped up in some very fun writing and thoughtful observations, and at no time do you get the impression that this is a man who breezes into a town and walks straight back out without taking some kind of interest in it. Whether it's trying to find something to do on a Sunday when everything's closed, or digging way back into history to help uncover characteristics of a certain place (or even trying to do something as simple as book a table at Café Nero), his determination to find out just a little more about a place is rewarded. Plus, as we learn, sometimes you only need a football to make comedy gold.

If there's a criticism, there are moments from gigs that I'd love O Briain to have expanded upon. He diligently notes the characters in the audience he discovered at each gig he went to, and I found myself dearly wishing, for instance, to find out just what he could do when he found a Second Life programmer in row B. As he notes when he receives a transcript of a DVD recording of one of his shows, though, there are things that simply don't work in print. Perhaps you really did have to be there.

Tickling The English is a smashing read, and offers far more than a simple tour diary of going from place to place and being stuck on the motorway for hours at a time. With the promise at the end that another tour is in the offing, it'll be interesting to see whether O Briain looks to a follow up book at some point in the future. For now, though, this is a very good book from a very funny and interesting man.

Tickling The English is out now.