Dom Joly is a polymath, so while you may think you know him from the guerrilla improv pranks of Trigger Happy TV and his japes in the Australian jungle in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, he has led an extraordinarily diverse life.
BBC chat-show host, sketch-show performer, travel writer and presenter, sports columnist, war-zone author, and now he has his first film, War Of The Flea, in development in America.
His debut stage tour bills him as “one of the UK’s most innovative and entertaining comedians”, but the show comes as a surprise to the chameleon Dom, who had never considered himself a stand-up. That was his agent’s idea.
Dom had to come up with some content and decided he would talk his audience through highlights of his past ten years: the perils of drinking your way around the world; skiing down volcanoes; holidaying in Chernobyl and North Korea; becoming a paparazzo; trying to fly across the Grand Canyon strapped to an eight-foot rocket; turning into Tintin; being arrested in Switzerland while dressed as a yeti; discovering that he had been at school with Osama bin Laden in Beirut; and eating from Gillian McKeith’s pants while imprisoned in the Australian jungle.
On a 60-date tour from April to July, Dom, 44, will attempt to make sense of it all with the aid of his holiday snaps, part of his collection of 10,000 photos from the Joly files.
• We had a Joly chat before the itinerary began...
How are you feeling as you step out into the unknown, Dom?
“I’ve never played live. Never done any stand-up. And I’m terrified!
“It’s my biggest phobia in life, public speaking and stand-up. People know me from Trigger Happy TV and assume I’m a comedian and must have done stand-up, but when people ask me to turn up and do 100 minutes, I say, ‘I can’t do ten minutes unless you want me to impersonate this squirrel’.”
How come you are doing a sort-of stand-up tour then?
“My agent booked the tour while I was in the jungle. I just didn’t know what to do… and then I realised that was the point. I don’t know what I do. My kids don’t even know what I do. They think ‘Dom Joly’ is a job. They once asked ‘What is Dom Joly?’ So that’s what the show is – it’s me trying to work out actually what I do.”
You are not a stranger to public speaking…
“Last year, I did a book tour for my book The Dark Tourist, when I’d show my holiday snaps of North Korea, skiing in Iran and all these unusual places I went to. That’s the point of the book; these are the last places in the world you can travel without seeing a Starbucks every 100 yards.
“Anyway, at the last date in Cheltenham, I played to 600 people and it went really well and it made me think I could do a stage tour, and now I’ve got ten years of material about what’s happened to me once I became famous. Things that went wrong; getting arrested, getting punched by Lily Allen. Going around the world getting drunk to look at cultural attitudes to drinking. Being in the jungle.
“So in this show I give you a lesson with photos and clips in how not to live your life in public.”
You don’t consider yourself to be a comedian but people find you funny….
“I had no interest in being a comedian. I worked at ITN, then the BBC and I was a diplomat in Prague for a year because I was interested in the European Commission after my university days at the London School of Oriental and African studies.
“So I did all sorts of stuff and was sort of a political anorak, and though I loved doing it, it wasn’t really me. But then I was taken on for a documentary series for Mark Thomas as a researcher, and when I had to drive a tank through a drive-thru McDonalds, I thought ‘I’m loving this and they’re paying me for it’!”
And so the prankster came to the nation’s attention. Is there a characteristic, a thread, that runs through what you have done in your varied career?
“My real skill in life is to have a poker face and be able to lie. My forte is making things up, but for this new show I need a basic skeleton around which I can riff.
“I’ve done such weird things in the past ten years, so though you have to exaggerate I can back it up with the photographic evidence.”
Sum up what the audience can expect from Welcome To Wherever I Am?
“The show is about assumptions. I just assume everyone knows me, so that they know what’s me mucking about – like the jungle – and me being serious – like the book. But of course I forget they haven’t got a clue who you are. They know you by your public image.
“So when I do something like the jungle as me, they just think, ‘Oh that’s who he is, he’s a tw*t’. And for instance when I did This Is Dom Joly, they went, ‘Oh I used to like you on Trigger Happy, and now you’re just this really shouty person’. So the message of this show is simple: I’m not a shouty person. I’m misunderstood.”
• Welcome To Wherever I Am, An Evening With Dom Joly, Harrogate Theatre, June 13, 8pm, and Grand Opera House, York, June 14, 8pm. Box office: Harrogate, 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk; York, 0844 871 3024 or grandoperahouseyork.org
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