SINGAPORE — Having frequent collaborator Ricky Gervais call him a “stick insect with glasses” on British radio can’t be the most affirming term of endearment, but for comedian Stephen Merchant it seems pretty normal. After all, it is his gangly-awkwardness that is the focus of the new HBO series, Hello Ladies, for which he is lead actor, writer and director.

Set in Los Angeles, Stephen Merchant stars as Stuart, a web designer from London who has moved to the United States searching for excitement and romance — a subject that hits close to home for Merchant.

“Like me, Stuart grew up seeing Los Angeles as this place of glamour, of fantasy, of beautiful people,” said Merchant over the phone.

“And he sort of decided, ‘You know what? Damn it. I’m going to have a piece of that action. I can go to LA, I can reinvent myself, I can buy myself a nice house and convertible, and I can be the person I’ve always wanted to be’. So the idea is that he has tried to reinvent himself in another place, and it’s not working out.”

But while Stuart might come off exceptionally horrible during his dates (he’s “a little bit selfish and a little bit desperate”), Merchant does help to lend a certain tender awkwardness that comes from his own life experiences.

“There’s a little bit of the 15-year-old me in Stuart, the kind of awkward guy who’s not quite comfortable in his own skin, and there’s the 25-year-old me who’s working too hard to seem cool and sexy, and there’s a little bit of the 30-year-old me after the success of The Office, you know, feeling a little bit entitled,” says Merchant.

“It seems on the surface he’s a bit of a d*** but ... in the end he’s looking for love and he is a kind of lonely man who’s looking to make a connection and he’s just going about it the wrong way. We discover later a list of dreams, (and) they start off with things like ‘feel more relaxed during a lap dance’ but you will discover that he’s thinking of (having a) wife and kids and marriage and happiness and the final point in his list is ‘don’t die alone’.

Merchant continued: “He’s getting older and he wants someone, but unfortunately he also wants that person to be this sort of supermodel with a PhD in Philosophy, because he wants to take her back to his school reunion to show her off to the girls who said ‘no’ and the guys who laughed at him and said he was nobody.”

CRINGE COMEDY

Those familiar with Merchant’s body of work — he’s best known for acting in and writing various comedies like The Office and Extras — will know that nothing is truly sacred. Hello Ladies is no different: One of Stuart’s friends is the wheelchair-bound Kives (Kevin Weisman from Alias), and he’s played quite differently from the usual wheelchair-bound characters we see on screen.

“I like the idea that it’s a sort of a cosy middle-class thing that we can all assume that everyone who’s a wheelchair user or has a form of disability is somehow a saint — because they have to deal with this kind of thing, and of course that’s not the case.

“Some of them are douches, just like anyone else. It just seemed like an interesting contrast, him slightly using his disability to woo girls and they feel a bit sorry for him but actually he’s kind of a d***.”

All these ingredients result in comedy that focuses on the awkwardness of real-life situations — something people have started referring to as “cringe comedy”. Based off his stand-up comedy tour of the same name, Hello Ladies presents the awkward situations that any of us might face in the dating world, but Merchant says he never set out to make people cringe.

“Well it’s funny because people talk about ‘cringe comedy’ and I honestly never set out to make people cringe. I just always work from what I think is funny, and I guess the things that I find funny are things where people are in social situations and are embarrassed or humiliated — I guess that’s the thing I’m most fearful of in real life. And it’s happened to me in real life hundreds of times, and there’s something about doing it in comedy that means you can take ownership of it.”

For example, Merchant went to a party two months and someone handed him some chocolate with pot in it.

“I ate this piece of chocolate at this big Hollywood party, full of comedians and other actors, and I immediately went into a hole. It’s like I was inside treacle ... I thought I’d get a breath of air, so I walked to the outside area, but in doing that, I walked straight through an eight-foot plate glass window that shattered in its entirety. And now I’m just outside the party staring back in at the party — which is obviously now silent — 200 people are just staring at me, and many of the comedians are thinking ‘is he injured or can we take pictures of this?’”

But that’s not to say that Merchant is only capable of the cringe-inducing humour — on set he’s more than willing to indulge in some physical comedy, even if it results in him ruining a scene.

“I would be doing a scene, and I would start trying to make the other actors laugh for my own amusement — it was such a weird perverse thing,” says Merchant. “I remember doing a scene which involved bagels — someone brought bagels in, and I wasn’t on camera, but every time they turned to look at me I was holding the bagels in a different place on my body, like, pretending they were boobs — I mean, the most juvenile stuff. I’m not talking sophisticated comedy here, this is the most adolescent nonsense, but it was making me giggle like a schoolboy.”

BYE BYE ‘BLIGHTY’?

Though he’s moved to Los Angeles for the show, Merchant isn’t turning his back on London and on working with his old partner in crime, Gervais, ever again. Merchant took the call in London, having just returned from LA, and it did have him considering leaving London behind.

“I actually just came back from LA — I landed last Sunday and I’ve already got a cold. I didn’t have a cold the entire time I was in LA. So, that might be reason alone to say goodbye to England, because I’m sick of bloody cold. But no, I wouldn’t ever turn my back on the country and I wouldn’t turn my back on Ricky either.

“Ricky’s not involved with this project mainly because of how it came about. It was a stand up show first called Hello Ladies ... and HBO saw it when I performed in LA and they said ‘what do you think about doing it as a sitcom’, and the thing which they suggested which intrigued me was to take this very English, very tall, pale, nerdy English guy and transpose him to LA.”

It could have been set in London, he qualified, but somehow the character would have been more plugged-in if he was in London. “You know, he’d have been a bit more at home there. There was just something nice about playing with this idea of the loneliness of LA and ... that sort of seemed to be part of what made the idea interesting. But it’s certainly not me turning my back on Blighty.”

And you won’t be seeing Ricky Gervais in a guest role — at least not this season.

“If you bring Ricky into the show, people will be like ‘Oh it’s Ricky! What’s he going to do with Steve?’ And it seems more like a stunt. Whereas using all these new faces, it allows the realism of the world to take over ... I’ll never say never, but he’s certainly not in this season.”

DATING FOR DUMMIES

As a show that focuses on the foibles of an awkward man in the dating world, Hello Ladies comes with a “don’t” list for dating, something Merchant came up with together with co-writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, based on their own personal dating stories. “We made that list everything that Stuart does, are the things you shouldn’t do — (such as) bringing up abortion while talking to some girls in a bar. The key thing which the character suffers from, which is a big ‘don’t’, is ‘don’t try as hard’.

“There’s a lot of the aspects of real stories that have happened to us that we’ve sort of dramatised in one way or another in the show,” added Merchant. “There’s a story Lee told me. He wound up chasing a girl at a party in the Hollywood hills, and then as soon as he got there he realised that she was actually seeing someone else. And so he had to walk back down the hill because he couldn’t get a cab, but he was terrified of coyotes so he was walking down the hill making ‘yip! yip!” noises to scare off these coyotes.”

Merchant himself might have been like that, but these days he says he’s got it “slightly more figured out now”, and doesn’t shy from meeting people.

“I spent a lot of my youth in dark rooms watching TV comedies and now I quite like the idea of opening the curtains and going outside, seeing what real people are doing. I don’t mean I just stand around in the park staring at people. I mean I meet people and talk to them. And have a beer.”

So, for someone whose life is the basis of a “how-not-to” guide to dating, Stephen Merchant is now pretty upbeat about his chances in the dating world, now that he’s in LA.

“I’m getting rejected by some of the most attractive women in the world now - and that’s a win for me.”

What: Hello Ladies

When: Mondays, 9.30pm

Where: HBO/HBO HD (StarHub Ch 601/655)