Bridget Christie admits there may well be a link between her stopping dressing up on stage (she has been ants, donkeys, Charles II) and winning the highest accolade in UK comedy, the Foster’s Comedy Award.

Things changed after an incident at an airport in Belfast when she was stopped for carrying a fishing rod with a baby Jesus hanging on the line.

The props were for a show about Catholicism, in which Christie re-enacted Jesus’s ascension to Heaven by reeling him up to the ceiling.

“You had to be there, it looks better than it sounds,” she jokes, speaking about last year’s Housewife Surrealist show, which opened with her arriving in a shopping-trolley Pope mobile, dressed in robes.

“I was stopped at Customs because I had all this fishing line wire. They got it out and it was all attached and there was little Jesus on the end of it. All they were saying was, ‘We can’t let you on an aeroplane with this wire, it is a weapon’.

“I said, ‘It’s a prop. I’m doing my show in Belfast’,” continues Christie, between devilish laughs. “But they didn’t mention the fact there was a Jesus on the end of the fishing line or ask what it was for."

She resolved to do the next show without props.

"It’s much easier to tour if all I need is a microphone.”

There’s a bit more to the award-winning A Bic For Her than that. Christie stepped up her campaign to reignite the feminism debate after an epiphany (as you might have heard on BBC Radio 4’s Bridget Christie Minds The Gap). Several things prompted it: a reviewer had written that she was only getting gigs because her husband is Stewart Lee, plus she’d read about the early mortality rate of women in Africa. And on top of that a man farted in the women’s section of a bookshop when she visited.

She says she is not alone in thinking misogyny has made a comeback.

“There is something in the air. There really, really is. Lots of people have arrived at the same point at the same time. Somebody said to me you have done two shows about feminism and your radio series, I suppose you will talk about something else next year.

“I’m not only going to talk about this for the next 50 years. I will be talking about other things as well but there is an awful lot to sort out.”

She feels liberated to be without props and costumes and to be talking about something which is so important to her. She lives in Stoke Newington and Mary Wollstonecraft is a heroine.

Not only that, “people seem relieved to be listening to it”.

Winning the comedy award means she has a platform – a louder voice, as it were. New faces are in the audience, too. More men, she is keen to point out, between all the self-deprecation.

“I’m hoping it all dies down soon and I can go back to just being an unknown obscure comic. I was really surprised and it was really great, but there is now a level of expectation on me, so I have to keep doing work either as good as the last show or better.”

A Bic For Her is more Beyoncé and biros than leg hair and man-hating. It’s comedy not lecture.

“I have to remember I have to make it funny. When I started talking about it, I thought it has to be good because if it isn’t, it gives people the opportunity to write what they wanted to write anyway, which was, ‘I really wanted to like this because it is about feminism but unfortunately it is just not funny’.”

Christie is taking action elsewhere. She was in Brighton in September as a panellist on a debate organised as part of Brighton Digital Festival about the internet’s effect on feminism. She admits the movement will not get far using traditional channels.

“I do think we could be more militant and break the law more. I say no more peaceful protests. I don’t condone violence but I do condone criminal damage.”

She has some previous, mind – shoplifting make-up when she was 12. “I don’t need to steal make-up any more – I can buy it. I’m going to spend all the money I got from feminism on improving my looks.”