Kiell Smith-Bynoe is mildly annoyed. Not in a huff or anything, just a bit baffled. He’s in Nando’s in Vauxhall – famously, a place where you can buy and eat chicken – and he’s after an extra couple of extra legs to go with his medium-hot half chicken. His request is denied. Nando’s, the leading poultry restaurant in the country, which shifts about half a million chickens in the UK every week, can’t stretch to a couple of extra drumsticks. He is (politely) perturbed.

He heads back to his table tucked away deep in the converted railway arches. He’s popped out from rehearsals for a stage production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector to chat about taking over from Sara Pascoe as the host of The Great British Sewing Bee. He was a contestant on the 2021 Christmas special, and didn’t think he’d particularly impressed judges Esme Young and Patrick Grant at the time. 

“I thought, ‘Are they asking me to come back on? And if they are, why is it coming through a DM from Patrick Grant rather than a formal offer to my agent?’ And he was just like, ‘Would you come back and do the main gig?’”

Smith-Bynoe is in a chatty mood when we meet on a Friday lunchtime, chicken legs notwithstanding. He tells me jumped at taking his first presenting gig. “I am flattered that they asked,” he says, “but I really don’t understand why. Still don’t.”

But he’s long been a fan. One of the reasons he’s into Sewing Bee – it’s Bake Off but with clothes designers, basically – is its good vibes.

“It’s really different to some other competition shows. Like, the contestants really love each other, immediately, and they’re all like a family, and they’re so sad when someone else goes.”

And while he can’t exactly make clothes, he sure knows how to wear them. He’s a stylish guy – today he’s wearing a red and black checked overshirt and brown trucker hat emblazoned with the title of his improv show Kool Story Bro – but reckons most people can connect with clothes. “Not everyone has an interest in pottery, or even baking, but, you’ve gotta wear some clothes,” he reasons. “By law.”

He has his meal now – sides of chips and corn on the cob; extra perinaise, peri salt – and is about to set about it. Then he remembers he’s in Nando’s. “Oh shit, you have to get your cutlery yourself in this gaff…” And he’s up again.

At 35, Smith-Bynoe is at a bit of a juncture. Up to now he’s carved out a place in British comedy as a guy who excels in likeable and daft ensemble stuff – as in BBC One’s hugely popular Ghosts as spectre-communing Alison’s non-communing husband Mike, and in Channel 4’s cult comedy Stath Lets Flats as the grumpy estate agent Dean – while also being one of the finest Taskmaster contestants of them all.

But right now he’s getting ready to stretch out. Ghosts ended with a perfectly pitched finale last winter, though Smith-Bynoe would have been up for another run (the Ghosts Whatsapp group is still very busy, though now co-creator, writer and trouserless star Simon Farnaby, who’s also co-written Wonka and Paddington 2, is out in LA doing his Hollywood thing).

It was a comedy that built up the kind of devoted fandom sitcoms don’t usually get – families all watched together, but it won a particularly intense love from young people who have followed the team behind it from the Horrible Histories series they watched as children. 

At a screening at the BFI just before the latest series went out, that love was poured out to the cast. Fans cosplaying as The Captain, Robin the Caveman, uptight Fanny and the rest of the gang presented Smith-Bynoe with gifts including a bracelet, original artwork, Dutch stroopwafels, and a handmade figurine of his character Mike, which is now on a shelf in his office. 

“I mean, sometimes in this industry, you sort of wonder if what you’re doing is important,” he says. “Or if you’re just sort of boosting your own ego by hearing applause and laughter. But sometimes, every now and then, someone will come up to you and say, ‘This thing means so much to me and my family’, or ‘It changed my life for this reason’, or ‘When I was going through this, I used to watch it and it was my comfort show.’ And it reminds you that when we go up on stage or in front of the camera and do this silly voice or do this thing, it is important.” 

He looks around. “Not important enough to get, like, a discount at Nando’s, for example. But, you know, to people.” 

His other breakout series, Stath Lets Flats, had its final – we think – series in 2021. If there were any more, though, Smith-Bynoe would jump at it.

“Jamie could say, like, ‘Stath garbage collection, one o’clock’, and I will be there,” he says. “Anything – anything – to do with that show, I’ll be involved. I love it so much. It’s my favourite thing.”

Smith-Bynoe grew up in east London, between Forest Gate and East Ham. He got into acting proper through teenage classes at Theatre Royal Stratford East, and quickly realised it was what he wanted to do. His mum, Jen, made sure he got his A-levels first, though, even if most of his business studies classes were spent wondering when he’d next get to act. There was one big goal.

“I just wanted to be in The Bill, man. And it finished the year I left drama school. And I was like, ‘This is deliberate. This is a deliberate attack on me.’”

Now, after Ghosts and Stath, he wants to remind everyone that he is, in fact, an actor. While he was shooting the second series of the heist caper The Curse last year, conversation turned to whose career everyone would like to replicate if they could. “And I said Mark Strong. And they were like, ‘I don’t think Mark Strong would do Taskmaster.’” 

There’s a lot of new stuff happening for Smith-Bynoe right now. But even more pressing than the Gogol play, or Sewing Bee, or finding the knives and forks, is his attempt to help his mum move back to Barbados. 

Smith-Bynoe was raised by his mum, who moved to London in 1961 when she was nine, and later took on the role of matriarch to her own brothers. “My grandad went blind quite young, so my nan had to do the work for everyone. My nan worked hard. My mum looked after the boys. The boys rebelled against her because she was their sister playing the mum, and ended up going down paths that she didn’t want me to go down.”

His uncles had had run-ins with the law, and his mum made sure the young Kiell definitely didn’t.

“I was just bored,” he says. “I was really bored. My mum was very strict. It’s not like I was, like, playing out all the time.” 

She would take him with her to Barbados for the whole six weeks of each school summer holiday. “All of my friends were just kicking a ball against a wall in east London. And I wanted to do that. My mum was taking me across the world to go and see these aunties and uncles that are like 40, 50 years older than me. And I’m an only child, so it’s not like I went with siblings where we could just have a laugh – it was just me and adults all the time.”

He’s fully aware that going to a Caribbean paradise for six weeks doesn’t sound like much of a hardship, and it was, he now recognises, very handy for picking up little tics and traits of the adults around him. “I spent so much time alone, just sort of playing with my imaginary friend, or making shit up in my room, which of course added to all the creativity,” he says. “Which is good now. But at the time I was just so bored.”

When he went to the Caribbean to shoot an episode of Death in Paradise in 2020, though, he realised why his mum loved it so much, and he’s been visiting with his mum regularly to try to sort out a house and everything else. His nan had wanted to move back too, but her health didn’t hold out long enough. Barbadian bureaucracy doesn’t move at lightning speed, but Smith-Bynoe’s keen to make sure his mum gets to move. 

“I think my mum deserves to be in Barbados in the sun and not having to deal with, like, the state of this country, and also the weather, and all of those sorts of worries.” 

He’s got to head back into rehearsals. It feels good going back to the stage. “But also, it’s so many words. And you can’t just go, ‘Ah, can I just do that again?’ Because the audience will ask for their money back.”

‘The Great British Sewing Bee’ returns tomorrow at 9pm on BBC One. ‘The Government Inspector’ is at Marylebone Theatre until 15 June (marylebonetheatre.com)