Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  I couldn’t resist.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, waving a little too frantically, ‘moving in, are you? I’ve got a hot tub . . .’ They smiled politely and backed away into the safety of the house that they would now clearly never buy.

  As usual, most of the funniest stuff was in between takes when I was arsing around for the crew – more of my and Sam’s for the beauty stuff. I particularly used to enjoy trying to sell drugs while dressed as the vicar. I’d sidle up to someone and whisper, ‘What do you need? I’ve got Hash, Whizz, Uppers, Downers, Purples, Blues, Horse, Peyote . . .’

  The bemused passer-by would turn around and give a double take, but I would press on.

  ‘If you’re looking for shooters then I’m totally tooled-up back at the vicarage. But we’ll have to meet there ‘cos the filth are watching me like hawks . . . Pretend we haven’t had this chat and I’ll meet you there in ten . . .’

  I’d wander off, leaving them standing and staring at me in astonishment with Paul’s hyena cackle ringing in my ear.

  We only had one unfortunate incident. We’d set up for one shoot around the river and a couple of our cameramen were using one of their favourite tricks, the Pramcam. This involved hiding a camera in a pram and covering it with a blanket. The cameraman then leant over the ‘baby’ and filmed the action while pretending to be a doting parent. Beautiful as this scene of fatherly devotion was, it started to raise some suspicion. The sight of a man leaning into a pram for hours on end can cause some misunderstanding. I’d often hear the words ‘Camera Two, need a wife . . .’ in my ears. Paul would have realised that one of the cameramen had been staring into his pram for too long and was starting to attract attention. A female AP or runner would be dispatched to join the cameraman in staring at their nonexistent baby. It looked a bit more normal.

  Sometimes, however, we were too late, especially when we happened to have set up outside a bank. Concerned staff in the establishment, believing that an elaborate bank heist was about to take place, called the Cotswold SWAT team that we’d met many years before. We carried on filming, unaware of any problems until Operation Bacon swung into action. Once we had explained the situation and confirmed that the Pramcam operators were neither exhibitionist paedophiles nor part of some sophisticated stakeout, the police alert was reduced to a code amber.

  We filmed a sketch that I adored down in Padstow, in Cornwall. I was dressed in a long coat, inside which the art department had pinned about forty different types of cake in little plastic boxes (so that they wouldn’t get crushed). The crew set up on the other side of the harbour and filmed across the water to me hanging around and looking very suspicious. I would then approach people seated on benches, open my coat and surreptitiously enquire as to whether they ‘wanted any cake?’ They would look surprised and refuse, and I would then reel off the longest list of cakes that I could remember. I was a ‘cake dealer’. It was basically getting a Class A drug deal joke onto Saturday night family TV. It made me laugh anyway.

  I loved the Bet you’re wondering what happened to me? character. This was myself in a wheelchair, covered in plaster and looking like I’d broken every bone in my body. I’d be left by my ‘nurse’ (the wonderful Naomi) next to a couple on a bench and wait for them to ask what happened. I would then launch into a long and fantastical story that got more implausible every time: ‘I’m a Devon/Dorset honey smuggler and got attacked by a bear’ or ‘I’m a scientist and got drunk at the office party and fell into the Hadron Collider’. My best story was a recurring joke about Alan Titchmarsh having a terrible temper. I told a couple that I’d been at the Chelsea Flower Show and had happened to mention that I didn’t think Titchmarsh’s garden was quite as good as his one the previous year, and ‘he went mental’.

  We repeated this joke in Croydon at a big sports store, where I set myself up as a bouncer. I told people wanting to go in that the store was temporarily closed so that Alan Titchmarsh could select his summer foot wardrobe. ‘He doesn’t like ordinary people seeing his feet . . .’ I said. People went predictably ballistic.

  I had a bit of history with Titchmarsh. In one of the last Trigger Happy TV celebrity interviews, I’d lured him down an alley near Broadcasting House. I was about to interview him, while dressed as a down-and-out Santa, when his PR person clicked that something was wrong and started dragging him away. He looked very confused. I was so annoyed that we’d been rumbled that I then behaved very badly to a national treasure. As we exited the alley, Sir Paul McCartney was leaving Broadcasting House and, spotting Father Christmas, gave him the obligatory thumbs up. I am ashamed to say that I returned the greeting with a rigid digit. The look on Macca’s face was priceless.

  I did my bit to encourage Scottish secession from the Union. We spent a week filming in Glasgow and the environs. One of the scenes we filmed was me approaching Scots in George Square while dressed as a tweedy English professor, accompanied by my Scottish ‘interpreter’. The joke was simple – the interpreter would ask the Scot something in a broad Scottish accent and then repeat the answer to me in exactly the same words but in an English accent. I would then ask a question in English and the interpreter would repeat it in a Scottish accent despite the Scot announcing that he was speaking English too. We ramped it up a bit when I produced an orange and some toothpaste and asked the interpreter to ask the Scot whether he had any idea what these objects were? One particular guy went berserk, and I was very lucky to escape without the traditional Scottish appreciation of bad comedy: a Glasgow Kiss.

  It wouldn’t have been one of my TV shows if I hadn’t managed to blag a week or so away filming somewhere hot. I suggested various places like Cannes, Rimini, Miami, but ITV decided that this might alienate their core audience and insisted on . . . Benidorm. This didn’t fill me with pleasure but still, a trip’s a trip, and I really will go anywhere that I haven’t been before – it’s an addiction.

  Benidorm was, if anything, worse than I could have expected. What was probably once a rather lovely little village nestled in a spectacular bay and blessed with a long, golden beach was now Sodom and Gomorrah. You all know what it looks like: a beach packed tight with tattoos in front of a long row of hideous apartment blocks. What really summed it up for me was when I spotted a long line of dangerously drunk teenage girls queuing up to ride an enormous Bucking Penis – this truly was the decline and fall of Western civilisation before my eyes. Or maybe I was just getting old? Looking back from the admittedly rather wonderful beach you’d see nothing but row after row of soulless tower blocks designed, it seemed, by architects with a visceral hatred of form and beauty, and this in a country that had produced the Alhambra. We were staying in a curious golf resort in the hills just behind the town. The owners, perhaps shamed by what had happened below, had decided to turn their establishment into the Spanish equivalent of Portmeirion. Every building in the vast and rather empty complex was an exact replica of real, prominent buildings in the Costa Brava. The place was supposed to have the feel of a Spanish village but was actually more like the set of The Truman Show. There was a mock central square that we sat in for coffee but unfortunately the owners, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that people didn’t want to sit in tranquillity, soaking up the dying rays of the sun while sipping on sangria. No, they felt that what we really wanted was a mini-disco in which hugely powerful, hidden speakers blared out ‘The Hokey Cokey’ in Spanish while a demented woman in a jumpsuit cavorted around screaming into a microphone and trying to get the two or three children hanging about to dance. It was a scene that The Fast Show would have passed on for being too unrealistic.

  I decided to go for a late swim but changed my mind when I got to the pool, as a gentleman of a certain age was being ‘relieved’ by a rather enthusiastic hooker in the shallow end.

  The following morning we were up bright and early and down into town, ready to start filming. We were constantly in danger of being mown down by the quite ridiculous number of ‘disability’ scooters zooming ar
ound the place. In Benidorm, these were not the exclusive domain of the disabled but seemingly the popular choice of transportation for every visitor. I saw whole families drive past in convoys with the drivers’ ages ranging from six to sixty. It appeared that they were cheaper to rent than mopeds, and of course you could drive them into shops so no need for that knackering use of legs when you were purchasing your beer, fags and condoms.

  Halfway through the afternoon and trouble started. A very large and irate Neapolitan swaggered into the bar where we were filming and claimed that one of our crew had knocked him off his moped, and that I had then sworn at him (completely untrue). He announced that he had been ‘disrespected’, that ‘nobody a-disrespect a-somebody from a-Napoli’, and that he was going to ‘a-kill a-someone’. His angry eyes scanned our rather nervous group before settling on me. I was clearly the chosen one. This was unfortunate, as I happened to be dressed as a Spanish lothario complete with medallions, leather trousers and an abundance of chest hair. The barman whispered to us that the protagonist was ‘local Mafia’. I nodded at him in a manner that conveyed that this was not reassuring news. The Neapolitan, already a visitor himself to Benidorm, took one look at me and clearly assumed that a Colombian gang was trying to muscle in on his action. I happened to look like Pablo Escobar’s mad brother, which helped. He squared up to me with his tattooed plumage on full display. I noticed a handgun in the back of his jeans. That was enough for both ITV and myself, and I was whisked away to the safety of our hotel for a day off spent lounging in the cleanest of the three pools.

  It was sadly only towards the end of our stay that we discovered the tiny section of Old Benidorm, with its winding streets, local bars and great little restaurants. There wasn’t a Brit in sight, which made it even better. We were a little gang – Paul and me, Kit and Jess who did my make-up and prosthetics every day. Those three months of the first series of Fool Britannia were probably the most fun I’d ever had filming. Like all good things in telly, however, it could never last.

  With the series in the can, we started the long edit. Normally this was my forte but ITV wouldn’t let me use the editor I wanted and refused to pay for me to fully edit the series. I had to pop in and out and try to either influence or polish things up that other people were editing. Then an edict came from on high that canned laughter was to be added to the series. A little part of me died. Canned laughter is such a curious thing. There is a rumour that all the laughter you hear over comedy shows was recorded back in the Sixties and is used over and over again. Most people who seem to turn up for TV show audiences tend to be quite elderly. This means that when you listen to canned laughter, you are listening to the sound of dead people laughing. Spooky.

  Series One was a passable first attempt. I wasn’t able to edit it the way I’d have liked and the addition of a cheesy voice-over and a laughter track had killed any semblance of credibility, but I was pursuing the golden calf: the early evening Saturday audience. Maybe this was what you had to do to get it?

  It wasn’t. It did well but wasn’t a huge breakout hit. The vicar definitely made an impression and I knew we had a really strong character. I wasn’t too downhearted, as I had always been looking at the first series as an experiment to see what worked and what didn’t. I wanted to learn the lessons from it and start to get it right in the second series. Harry Hill had not got TV Burp right until about the fourth series and ITV would definitely give me the time to get the thing right, that’s how TV works, right? Wrong.

  There was a very long and awkward silence from the powers-that-be until they finally recommissioned the series. It was hardly a strong vote of confidence, but then I thought back to Kevin Lygo at Channel 4 uuhhmming and aahhing over a second series of Trigger Happy TV when we were the biggest show on the telly. So I shrugged my shoulders and prepared to make a cracking second series.

  Then came the meeting. A new suit at ITV brought myself and a couple of others together to discuss what the second series should be like. After an hour I wanted to shoot myself. The upshot was that I was too posh and that my voice-over should go (I was thrilled), and that the show should be ‘warmer’ (that means less funny), and that we should have more ‘traditional’ set-ups (‘Can we do some Beadle-type things?’), and that I should not be in every sketch (‘Get some young people in’).

  I made a terrible decision. Rather than fighting them with everything I had, I caved in. I thought back to World Shut Your Mouth on BBC One, when I’d ignored everyone else and done exactly what I’d wanted. It had been a good show but so wrong for the channel, and I’d been chucked out of the Beeb. This was my chance to show that I could listen, that I could learn from my mistakes. So I decided not to fight, as we would just end up with a show that was pulling in two directions and pleasing nobody. Maybe these people did know better? It was their job after all. It was their channel. Maybe it would be brilliant?

  Besides, I had other things to worry about. I’d been approached by ITV to do yet another reality show, called Splash. Weird as it might sound, I’d always rather fancied myself as a bit of a diver. I’d been flinging myself off cliffs into rivers and lakes in Lebanon and Canada ever since I was a kid. This was an opportunity to be taught by Olympic diver Tom Daley, as well as to play the ‘keep the channel happy’ game. So I said yes.

  I’d made another terrible decision. Daley was barely involved – he’d show up for ten minutes to be filmed pretending to teach us before leaving. I was doing a five-hour drive there and back every day to the training sessions in Essex. Initially I was OK and I was the first one to go off the terrifying ten-metre board. Every part of you is screaming, ‘Go back, stop, you’re going to die!’ as you stand on the edge of that board. I did it, though, over and over, and got some pretty good, very basic dives in. My arms ached from them being ripped back in their sockets from the pressure of entering the water but I was pretty sure that I’d be OK.

  Then came the big night when I was squeezed into some weird 1920s bathing costume and I realised that I’d been spectacularly miscast in some homoerotic TOWIE spin-off. The communal caravan in which we all sat beforehand was a show in itself, a minor celebrity gumbo with Joey Essex managing to get stuck in the bathroom and Donna Air and me smuggling in champagne and getting pissed.

  I just wanted the whole thing to be over. When my moment finally came, and I climbed the diving platform up to the very top to meet Vernon Kay and the camera crew, I was in an out-of-body-type mode. I went to pieces on fear, shame, adrenaline and champagne. I can’t remember any of it except that I launched myself too far out and could feel myself rotating in midair. I remember everything going into slo-mo and thinking that this was how it was all going to end – I was going to break my back live on national TV in front of my whole family. My bowels would probably collapse and I would soil myself as the final indignity as, once again, I would be dragged out of a pool in front of the nation . . .

  The pain of the impact was unbelievable and I can still feel it. The good news was that I wasn’t paralysed. The bad news was that this meant that I had to continue with the show and be interviewed by Gabby Logan. I looked up to the audience to see my daughter looking at me in as supportive a manner as she could . . . I had to stop doing reality TV.

  Chapter 13

  Here We Go Again

  So by now I’d gone up, then down and was now up again, and about as mainstream as I’d ever thought possible. Not only was I making a Saturday night ITV show, but I was also starring in an ad campaign for Stena Ferries. The ad company had approached me and I’d assumed that they had done so because of my travel pedigree. After a while I was not so sure. We filmed it in Belfast, a city that I loved. The ad people were really nice, but it was when I saw my wardrobe that I hesitated. I’d presumed that they wanted the traveller ‘Dom Joly’ in the ad. Looking at the outfit, however, it appeared that they wanted my Home Counties, paedophile doppelgänger instead. I was offered chinos, yellow shirt, loud jumper and . . . to top it all off . . . leathe
r driving gloves. I thought that there must be some comedic angle to this outfit that I hadn’t picked up in the script and so got dressed without much protest. As the filming progressed, however, it became clear that there was no subtext. In fact, there seemed no reason whatsoever for me to be dressed like Ronnie Corbett’s golfing partner. So, for the last couple of years, as I’ve tried to steer people away from my ITV mainstream stuff towards my more ‘serious’ writing side, I’ve regularly had to look out of the window to see an enormous billboard of me stuffing a suitcase into the back of some car on my way for a Car-cation. This always kills any attempt to convince people of my artistic seriousness. I recently drove my family to Istanbul and back over the Easter holidays, and we took a Stena ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. As I wandered around the ship I got some serious stares from bemused passengers. It must have been a bit like finding Lenny Henry in your Premier Inn bathroom. I think they all assumed that contractually I was forced to spend most of my time on a Stena ferry, just going back and forth while smiling at the good people on board. For the record – it was very nice.

  I’m not even going to mention the online poker ad I did in Israel, dressed in swimming trunks . . . Bugger . . . I just did. Ads are incredibly tempting for the impecunious celeb. The average ad spends in thirty seconds what I’d spend in six half-hours of Trigger Happy TV, and this is a very depressing but also rather attractive fact. It is therefore a stronger man than me who says no to an offer to do an ad – what Bill Hicks called ‘sucking the devil’s cock’. Sometimes, however, I really should pay attention to the fine print.