Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  This, while they watched scenes of mass, unexplained panic in about fifty theatres. It would have been brilliant . . . I still hope we make the film one day. I want to call it Scenes From a Movie That We Never Made. That should kill the box office stone dead.

  The tour was crazy, though – I was doing seventy dates and often the shows were in vast venues. When this happened and nobody showed up it was incredibly dispiriting, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the numbers. One night I’d be in Shrewsbury and have a sell-out to 800 people, and the next night I’d be in Hull playing to an audience of twelve. I could never anticipate whether I’d sell out or die, as the tour took me crisscrossing all over the country on a schedule that looked like a drunken spider had designed it. Fortunately, I had a wonderful Kiwi called Kylie who tour-managed for me and patiently put up with my fear and loathing while she drove me up and down the country from gig to gig, often with me unconscious in the back.

  My dad died suddenly about a week into the tour. I had to break off and fly to Lebanon for his funeral.

  He was a good man who served in the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War and then went to Oxford, before settling down to run the family business in Beirut. He was separated by two generations from me and we had a rocky relationship. He wrote several books during his life and I think that, given the choice, he would have loved to have been an author instead of feeling obliged to take over the family business. Unfortunately for his generation, duty was everything, and he made the best of what he was supposed to do. I always got the feeling that he perhaps subconsciously resented the fact that I set off to do exactly what I wanted, even if it took me some considerable time find out what that was.

  He never, ever spoke of my success. He never once congratulated me on anything that I’d achieved. Part of me used to put it down to the fact that he lived abroad and simply wasn’t aware of what I did, but this can’t have been the case. There were several times when I would be with him, having an awkward meal somewhere and someone would come up to me and ask for an autograph or say hello. He never acknowledged these weird incidents. It was all very peculiar. It had always been peculiar, however, ever since he and my mother divorced when I was eighteen.

  I think that he never really approved of me. Somehow I didn’t seem to live up to whatever personal benchmarks he had set for the perfect son.

  In the self-indulgence fest that was Being Dom Joly, there was a long, almost uncut scene in which I meet my fictional dad for lunch. It is so toe-curlingly awkward and stilted and pretty much reflects every meeting that I had with him. We had a bit of a rapprochement in the years before he died, but this was mainly because he started to lose his marbles a little. He became a very sweet old man with none of the moody, stressed underside that used to be ever-present. I developed quite a nice, simple relationship with this man, but sadly he wasn’t my father. My father had departed quite some time previously, leaving this pleasant shadow to live out the rest of his life, playing golf every day and drinking wine in the evening before falling asleep in front of the cricket.

  My dad, like myself, was born in Beirut to British parents and was always somehow stuck in some curious expat time bubble. I got the feeling that every time he returned to Britain he understood it less and less. His was a post-war Britain of codified rules and sunny days at Test matches. Despite my having been conceived in 1967, the entire Sixties movement and the subsequent youth culture takeover of the country had almost entirely passed him by.

  When he’d been a boy, his parents had sent him to boarding school in England. This having been during the war, he was forced to stay in the UK with relatives and would only return home to Lebanon once a year. He loathed every second of it. Being British, however, he decided to send me to the very same school (Haileybury College). I never quite understood this thought process.

  He grew up with the feeling, prevalent in his generation, that you should choose a career and stick at it whatever the difficulties. Work was work and then you could do the things you enjoyed. I was always determined that work would be what I enjoyed. Otherwise I would suck at it. He was a deeply honest and decent man, emotionally crippled by boarding school and the subsequent shock of war. I don’t think he ever truly recovered. He was unable to express himself emotionally to me, he loathed conflict, and yet this was a man who successfully ran a family business in Beirut throughout the civil war. He was brave and stubborn. I remember as a boy, when the house was being shelled night after night and we were all sleeping on mattresses in the basement, my dad would refuse to leave his bed on the exposed, top corner of the house. He was awarded the OBE in the Seventies. He was a bundle of contradictions, and my real sadness is that I’m actually rather similar to him but he never seemed to see that.

  We buried him in Beirut. The service was in the church in which I was christened. It used to sit on the seafront on St George’s Bay in Beirut but it was now surrounded by new glass high-rises and was quite a way inland, as the bay had been filled in with rubble from the ruins of old Beirut. It was a curious ceremony. For me, I had lost my father a long time ago, when he divorced my mother. We’d never really had a relationship since then and I had done my grieving throughout my twenties. I was very sad he was gone and it made me feel immensely mortal. I flew back to Britain in a curious state.

  I’d only missed two dates of the tour, but I was, not surprisingly, in a really bad place. I was not really in the right frame of mind to be doing my first live comedy tour. It was the secret to good comedy . . . timing.

  The show had to go on, however, and I was now surviving on a curious cocktail of vodka, Red Bull and Berocca that I would down before I went on stage. I felt empty, listless and seriously unhappy. I wasn’t sure if I could carry on but I couldn’t bear the idea of giving up. Then, about three-quarters of the way through the tour, something happened. I started to feel better and find my live feet a bit. I cut the show length down by a quarter, started to experiment and change it up every night. By the last couple of shows in London’s Bloomsbury Theatre, I had cracked it. I did seventy-two gigs in under three months. I was pleased that I’d seen it through. I would never, ever undertake something that was out of my comfort zone again. I needed to stick to what I was good at, whatever that was.

  Chapter 12

  Fool Britannia

  With the tour over, I set off round the world hunting monsters for my second travel book, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. I had no qualification to be a monster hunter except that I had a business card printed off that read:

  Dom Joly – Monster Hunter

  I travelled to Hiroshima, Northern California, Nepal, the Congo and British Columbia. It was as close as I’d get to actually becoming Tintin. Actually, that’s not strictly true. A couple of years previously I’d made a documentary about Tintin and the Black Island and had gone the whole hog – dyeing my hair ginger, donning the Belgian reporter’s costume and eventually landing on the beach in Barra, an Outer Hebridean island where Hergé got a lot of his inspiration from. For a while I roamed Scotland, a portly Tintin with a badly dyed Snowy as a companion. We’d hired a Snowy for the production and it was only when it started raining that we realised that the bastards had dyed the poor dog white. It was all very odd.

  I was at my happiest travelling the world on weird and wonderful wild-goose chases. This was what I loved. This was what I should be doing. The lure of television, however, works in mysterious ways. I’d just returned from the Congo when I got an email asking me to go and see ITV. I was intrigued. ITV had never really been my kind of channel and I was curious as to what they might want. It turned out to be rather interesting. Harry Hill had stopped making his fabulous TV Burp and they needed something to replace it. They were looking for a family-friendly, Saturday 6.30pm show. Because I’d been on I’m a Celebrity, they felt that I was now a familiar face to ITV viewers and wouldn’t frighten them too much. It was weird – I’d never gone on the show with a view that it might help anything other than my
bank balance and my waistline. Somehow, it had paid off handsomely.

  This was the TV mother lode. If you could crack that slot then the world was yours. ITV had this idea about a show that used archive footage of old ITV prank shows and then had me recreating them today. The idea was to do a sort of pseudo-scientific, Are we as gullible today as in the old days?-type show. This didn’t interest me too much but I was certainly up for having a crack at that time slot. I pitched a show on the spot, basically a kind of Trigger Happy-Lite that we would film all round Great Britain. My friend Adam Longworth gave me the ideal title one drunken night in the Groucho Club: Fool Britannia.

  ITV were interested and commissioned a pilot. I thought it might be cool to form a little prankster team so that I didn’t have to do everything myself. We found a couple of people online who were doing some innovative stuff and we started to film the pilot.

  The first character I had in mind was a vicar behaving badly. Institutional figures are great for hidden camera as people naturally trust them and the reaction was heightened when they behaved badly. My vicar was a very simple fellow but he ran his parish (we filmed in Bourton-on-the-Water) with a rod of iron. The scene we filmed for the pilot was him waffling on to a couple of Japanese tourists before wandering off and pushing a stunt man dressed as an old woman off a bridge into the river. ‘Clumsy me!’ he screamed in delight, before walking off.

  I’m at my best when I dress up as a character, approach strangers and engage them in conversation, before starting to turn it all a bit odd and surreal. For ITV Saturday night purposes, however, we needed something more obvious and mainstream to finish it off. So the vicar would always do something like pepper-spray a cyclist, steal an ambulance etc. For me, it was all about the pre-conversations. The vicar would always ask people where they were from and then politely launch into a tirade of abuse about their homeland. People didn’t know how to take it. The best vicar moment was quite subtle. I had an actress and her daughter sit on a bench by the river in Bourton. The little girl was holding a balloon. I waited until I spotted a real couple walking along the river towards me and then timed my entrance so that I could nonchalantly cut the little girl’s balloon string with a pair of scissors while putting my finger to my lips demanding omertà from the horrified couple.

  One of the most common questions I’m asked re hidden camera is whether I’ve ever been beaten up? The answer, I’m afraid, is no . . . Doing hidden camera has given me a very acute sense of imminent danger. So many times have I approached a stranger and started to talk to them when I’ve nipped it in the bud and walked away. It’s all in the eyes. Sometimes you look into somebody’s dead eyes that tell you immediately that this person has been released from Broadmoor and that you are in trouble. I’ve developed a traffic light system for judging people. Green is the perfect subject. They will believe everything you tell them – carry on. Amber is trickier – they are a touch suspicious and you must proceed carefully. Red is danger – they are potential serial killers and you must extricate yourself immediately and run away.

  A nun assaulted me once. It was when we were making Trigger Happy TV and we’d taken over the Tannoy system in a supermarket in Notting Hill Gate. The joke was that the Tannoy would describe a customer – ‘aisle three, red trousers, blue shirt, he’s back . . .’ – and I would appear as a very suspicious security guard and follow them around. We were doing this when a nun entered the store. We all looked at each other, unsure as to whether we should or not? In the end I nodded and the Tannoy boomed out: ‘The nun is back and she’s acting shifty by the yoghurts.’ I appeared round the corner to stare at the nun, who went mental. She started hurling cans of beans at me while swearing like a trucker. She eventually stormed out, having run out of ammunition to chuck. We never found out whether she was a genuine sweary nun or a stripagram.

  The closest I’ve ever got to actually being punched was while playing the vicar. I was chatting to some American tourists and being quietly rude about their country when an actor we’d organised started busking on a bridge behind me. The vicar did not like any disturbances in ‘his’ village and therefore excused himself to go and deal with the fellow. I grabbed the guitar and smashed it to pieces before hurling it into the river and then returning to chat with the shocked Americans as though nothing had happened.

  Out of the blue a very angry, shaven-headed passer-by got involved. He’d seen the incident and, rightly, had been incensed. He came up close to me, eyeballing me and demanding to know what I was up to. I tried to say something funny but he got even more aggressive and I was pretty certain he was about to clock me. I could feel the crew in two minds: on the one hand, this was great telly; but on the other, I might be kicked to bits. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, an AP appeared and started to explain what was going on. The guy changed tack immediately and started howling with laughter. It turned out he was a big fan and thought the whole thing was hilarious – he couldn’t believe he’d been fooled. We asked him whether he would sign a release form and he was initially happy to do so. Something suddenly struck him, however, and he stopped in his tracks . . .

  ‘You mean this will go out on the telly?’ he asked, looking very nervous. I wondered whether he was on parole or suchlike. We said that yes, this would definitely go out on the telly as it was very funny. He leant in and started whispering and pointing to a woman who was waiting for him: ‘Fing is, right, that lady is not my wife . . . We’re on a bit of a dirty break, if you catch my drift . . . I don’t fink it would be the best idea, putting us on the box . . .’ It was so frustrating but there was nothing we could do about it – we had to roll again and try to get something as good, but we knew we never would.

  We cut a pilot show together and it went down very well back at ITV – well, my bits did anyway. It turned out that they weren’t so keen on the other performers. I tried to look upset by this but actually I was pretty chuffed, as it meant I got my own Saturday night show on ITV without looking like I was desperate for it. To be fair, I had my doubts. To me, Saturday nights on ITV had been the epitome of naff – cheesy, lowbrow entertainment and not really where I had ever wanted to end up. I had no interest in becoming another Jeremy Beadle. On the other hand, I was filling the boots of Harry Hill’s TV Burp, an amazingly funny and surreal show that had opened up all sorts of possibilities for that slot. I didn’t want to make another Trigger Happy TV for now. Trigger Happy was made for my mates and me – it was what made us laugh. To have a hit Saturday night show on ITV, you had to do the hardest thing in telly – make a show that appealed across the board, grandpa, mum and dad, and the kids – all this without making it too dumbed-down. It was a tricky challenge.

  After much pondering, ITV finally commissioned a full series of Fool Britannia. My first job was to find a director. I was given the name of the current go-to guy in hidden camera. Paul Young had directed everything in the genre from Banzai to Balls of Steel. I immediately recognised the name and suddenly felt very old. Paul had been my runner on Series One of Trigger Happy TV and now he was going to be the director. In TV, it’s not policemen who appear younger and younger – it’s directors. He had a stupidly annoying, high-pitched laugh that I would constantly hear through my earpiece when we were filming, but it was a good thing, though. My main job on set was to make the cameramen and Paul laugh. If you can make the crew laugh, then you’re halfway there, because those bastards are a dour lot . . .

  ITV brought in a producer called Greg Bower, who had worked on the Trigger Happy homage, Fonejacker. He was to be the ‘grown-up’ of the show and the conduit between ITV and me. I’d never really got on with producers and I was very aware that I would have to play the game right if ITV and I were going to work. To say that Greg was a man of few words would be an insult to mutes. I don’t think he actually said a single thing in our first four meetings. It was only when I ordered a beer during one of our working lunches in ITV Towers that he expressed surprise. Greg was quite fantastically antisocial.
When we were on shoots, we would all go out together in the evening to blow off a bit of steam, have supper and a couple of drinks. Greg very much preferred his own company and would either remain in his room with an attractive bottle of red wine or be occasionally spotted dining with a friend in a dive bar. He was not a team player, but he also didn’t try to be my friend and stood up to me, which is what a producer should do. It meant that I didn’t have total control (which is always a good thing) and I worked far harder than I would have normally done. Greg, however, really liked to control things from his end. This was bad, as it meant that the show started to get divided between ideas that Greg and his ‘writing room’ came up with and the ideas that Paul and I had. Ours were always a lot more instinctive:

  ‘Give me a garden gnome costume and we’ll do something,’ I’d tell Greg.

  ‘What exactly would you be doing with the gnome costume?’ Greg would ask nervously.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, but it will be funny . . .’

  Greg would look unconvinced and we’d often have an awkward standoff.

  The problem was that I hated committing to plans as I’d never worked that way before, but Greg was right in that we needed to have some sort of structure and some end point to a gag. If I were to be left to my own devices then we would have ended up with a lot of weird and funny bits that would be difficult to mesh together without confusing Middle Britain.

  We eventually filmed the garden gnomes in Weymouth and it was very funny, if slightly odd compared to the rest of the show. We were filming on the coast, in somebody’s front garden that faced right onto a pathway. I leant on the garden gate and engaged with whoever happened to walk past. Things went rather well, the weather held, and we got some good stuff. After about an hour or so we cut for a break and I sat in a chair in the garden drinking a very welcome cup of coffee. That was when I noticed the estate agent showing a family around the house next door, which was for sale. They came into the seafront garden and the agent was busy describing the merits of the place. The family, however, were not listening. They were all staring at me, a six-foot human garden gnome in the neighbouring garden. There was no crew about – it was just my potential new neighbours and me.