Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  We looked dumbfounded. This was the first time anybody had ever even mentioned release forms or needing any form of legal consent from anybody. We were comedy cowboys. We were punk comedians. We were . . . buggered.

  It was announced the next day that War of the Flea would never be shown on Paramount . . . I can’t remember what we did next. I know we smuggled all the tapes out of Paramount but it was then a downward spiral that involved me going to the pub a lot and Sam rearranging his entire CD collection into alphabetical order. I would now have to get a proper job that I hated, and life would return to hideous normality.

  We’d had a friend of Myfanwy Moore, Gary Reich, nominally producing War of the Flea for us. I say nominally, because we mostly just buggered off and did our own thing without telling anybody. Gary was our grown-up link to everyone else.

  Anyhow, Gary got us to write up a document pitching a full-length series of War of the Flea. He wanted to take it to Channel 4 along with the master tapes of the series that we had smuggled out of Paramount after the nasty American had tried to seize everything. We were shocked. Channel 4? That was a proper channel, with proper viewers . . . Gary was insistent. He told us about the Comedy Lab, in which they wanted new people to make sample shows for them. So off he went. I went back to the pub and Sam started reordering his CDs again, this time by album cover colour. Two weeks later we got a call from Channel 4. They wanted to see us.

  We arrived at Channel 4 in Horseferry Road and were ushered into a room to meet a woman called Caroline Leddy. Caroline came straight to the point. She liked our stuff but was worried about taking on another programme that annoyed the establishment. She’d just finished dealing with the multifarious legal fall-outs from Chris Morris’s Brass Eye and she couldn’t face the idea of going through something like that all over again.

  ‘Couldn’t you do something simpler, just funny with no agenda?’ she asked pleadingly.

  I thought about this for a second. I could see no downside. The things that really made me laugh were pointless, stupid, silly, surreal . . . just what Caroline Leddy was asking for. So we agreed and she commissioned a Comedy Lab.

  We walked out of Channel 4 trying to look cool. The moment we rounded the corner, however, we both went mental. We were going to be on the telly – proper telly, with actual viewers and everything. How the hell had we managed this? Whatever, we were off.

  Chapter 2

  Trigger Happy TV (Red)

  We had a show to make, but nowhere to make it. I rang Alex Jackson-Long, who was now working at a production company called Absolutely, made up of all the ex-members of the surreal Scottish sketch show of the same name (‘Stoneybridge!!’) and it was immediately clear to me that:

  They seemed a nice friendly bunch.

  We had no other option.

  We met the head of the company, Miles Bullough. We said: ‘We’ve got a show commissioned at Channel 4, fancy making it with us?’

  Unsurprisingly, he said yes and we were given an office on the eighth floor of their premises in Alhambra House on Charing Cross Road. It was built on the site of the old Alhambra Theatre, a place where the Marx Brothers had made their first UK appearance. I liked this fact a lot.

  For the Comedy Lab, we tried to mix up all the different sorts of stuff we’d been filming at Paramount. The big mobile made its first proper appearance in the library of Imperial College London. For some reason, I was wearing a really bad fake beard. I think I wanted him to be a ‘character’, but like anything else with a theme it was soon dropped. We started the Comedy Lab with me interviewing a bemused Irvine Welsh outside a nightclub in Shoreditch, during which I proceeded to pretend to be suffering from an excessive intake of Ecstasy and collapsed mid-interview. I think, even then, we were keen to differentiate our hidden camera from the ‘Beadle’ model.

  There was a great scene with me dressed as a Womble, wandering around Wimbledon Common, muttering to myself and chucking rubbish around. The idea of a Womble on the verge of a nervous breakdown really made me laugh. We used several fluffy costumes in the show and this became a bit of a trademark. Among these were the fighting dogs, a Dalmatian and a brown dog always beating each other up in public. In the edit I made these slo-mo and overlaid them with big, gorgeous, sad tunes.

  The original idea was that there were so many CCTV cameras around London, and I wondered who actually monitored them? I thought it would be funny to set up these surreal scenes of violence right under the camera. The idea of someone checking the screens and spotting the dog violence amused me. We’d start the shot on the CCTV camera and then pan down to the action but we cut this in the edit, as it wasn’t relevant. Anything that was thematic or tried to make a point was soon jettisoned. There was only one intention in Trigger Happy TV: make it funny and occasionally beautiful.

  With the Comedy Lab finished and edited, we handed it into Channel 4. A couple of months later we got an invite to attend the series press launch in Wardour Street. Sam and I went along nervously, not quite sure what to expect. Nobody paid any attention to us. Everybody was interested in this larger than life Northerner called Peter Kay. He seemed rather full of himself and I’ve certainly never heard of him since . . .

  Sam and I felt awkward and quickly slipped away into the night.

  We only got one review. It was in the NME and it was rather good. The writer (a certain Mr Danny Wallace) was very nice and ended his review with the words:

  ‘The church of Trigger Happy TV will grow and grow . . .’ Sam and I were chuffed and bought several copies. Then . . . nothing. The show went out on, I think, a Wednesday night, and a couple of people I knew saw it, but it was not quite the great event I’d been anticipating.

  Our main worry, I seem to remember, was that the elderly astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, whom I’d ‘interviewed’ at the end of the show, might die before it went out and we’d have to scrap the whole thing. We needn’t have worried – it turned out that Moore was tougher than he looked and survived for many more years. Absolutely were making The Jack Docherty Show in a theatre just beside Trafalgar Square. We used to try and pinch their guests as they went in or out to use them for our nefarious purposes. We’d grabbed Sir Patrick and taken him into the square to interview him. I was asking him about the possibility of being hit by an asteroid whilst I kept looking up at the sky nervously. As he was in mid-answer I pretended to spot something, dropped the mike and sprinted away, before diving into one of the fountains as the credits rolled. Sir Patrick looked on bemused and befuddled. It was the Trigger Happy TV house style: if in doubt, run away . . . or fall down.

  We were hoping that we might now get a full series. We made enquiries at Channel 4 but there didn’t seem to be much of a hurry to make a decision. Channel 4 were putting together their attempt at a sort of Saturday Night Live show called The 11 O’Clock Show and Caroline Leddy told me that it would be very good ‘politically’ if we did something on it. I turned up for an ideas meeting – it was packed full of people like Sacha Baron Cohen, Marcus Brigstocke, Harry Thompson (legendary comedy producer), Francis Wheen, Ian Lee . . . Everyone doing anything was there and as usual I felt very out of place – imposter syndrome again. The problem was that Sam and I were not very clubbable types. We didn’t want to be in a gang. We wanted to be on our own, with no bosses and no hassle. We were realistic enough to realise that we had to play ball, however, so I suggested that with my political past, I go down to the party political conferences and take the piss. This was approved and we were put under the command of a strange, nerdy-looking bloke called Andrew Newman, who couldn’t stop telling us that he’d worked with Chris Morris.

  Off we went with a very young assistant producer called Damon Beesley (later to be a co-writer of The Inbetweeners). He had a list of jokes that Andrew Newman wanted us to do down at the conferences that I had no interest in doing whatsoever. We got to Brighton for the Tory conference. I was wearing my Westminster suit that I’d discarded after the interview for The Mark Thomas Comedy
Product. It made me look the part of a political reporter. Damon Beesley wanted Sam to film me on the beach doing an intro piece to camera. We stood there and did a couple but they were a little boring and I could see that Sam felt the same. After the fourth attempt I stopped and had a chat with Sam.

  ‘I’m just going to try something, Damon,’ I shouted as I ran towards the sea.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he screamed but it was too late. I had dived into the cold waves and was swimming out to sea. Sam was still filming. I got to about fifty feet offshore and then started swimming back in. When I got to the pebbly beach I scrambled to my feet and approached the camera. I did a piece to camera announcing that I’d just swum to the conference:

  ‘So . . . Let’s go see what’s happening.’ I walked out of shot and Sam cut.

  Damon put his head in his hands but Sam couldn’t stop laughing. I proceeded to try and interview ministers and MPs at the conference in a professional and serious manner but they couldn’t concentrate with me, soaking wet, bedraggled and shivering.

  ‘What on earth happened to you?’ they’d ask.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I fell off the pier, but I’m a professional. You’re the important one here.’

  It put them all off and made for some fabulously uncomfortable interviews. Sam and I even managed to get a chat with William Hague, the then Tory leader.

  ‘Are you not worried that all Young Tories are ridiculously nerdy weirdos?’ I asked Hague.

  ‘You should be in bed with a cup of hot chocolate,’ said Hague kindly.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m a professional, you’re the important one here . . .’ Hague looked horrified and was whisked away by a concerned-looking Sebastian Coe.

  We overheard Damon on a phone call to Andrew Newman.

  ‘They’re just pissing about, he’s soaking wet.’ He then came up to us and said that Andrew Newman had an idea he wanted us to do. Damon was going to get hold of some hula hoops and we were to find out whether we could get MPs to jump through hoops. I told Damon that this was a terrible idea and not funny. He replied that this was what Andrew Newman wanted. I refused.

  That was the end of our 11 O’Clock Show work. At the back of my mind I worried that I had blown our chances with Channel 4 for a Trigger Happy series, but there was nothing we could do.

  Then it all got worse when the show contacted Sam on his own to go and film something with Marcus Brigstocke. I was a bit jealous – I sort of considered us a team and didn’t like the idea of him doing stuff with other people. Being British, Sam and I could never really communicate things like this so I sulked and he went off to film at a Test match. The idea was that Marcus was going to run onto the pitch dressed as a toucan. Marcus smuggled the suit in, plucked up both his feathers and his courage and stormed the pitch, flapping his wings, and promptly got ejected from the ground. To my secret joy and Sam’s mortification, when they viewed the footage something had gone wrong and all they got was colour bars. He wasn’t asked again. I was delighted. We were comedy outcasts together.

  Neither Sam nor I had done comedy the ‘normal’ way, whatever that was – no stand-up, no Footlights, no writing jokes for others, no Radio 4 stuff. We just appeared out of nowhere and people didn’t like it. We didn’t care. As long as we had enough money to go out and muck about, everything was hunky-dory. The lure of a proper series on Channel 4, however, loomed at the back of our minds. We now both wanted it so badly but didn’t dare think too hard about it.

  Meanwhile, we needed some money. We got a call from an advertising agency. They were representing Peperami, the angry sausage snack. They’d seen our stuff on Paramount and wondered whether we would do some work with them. We couldn’t resist. The 1998 World Cup was about to be held in France and seemed an obvious target. Both Sam and I loathed football but we knew that the demand for stories around the tournament would be perfect. We found out that Hoddle was to name his squad in a live press conference, from a plush five-star resort in Spain called La Manga, in three days’ time. We decided to use an idea that we’d had for ages but never done. At press conferences there was always a cluster of microphones on the table in front of the speaker. These always had little boxes wrapped around them with the names of whatever news organisation they represented. We had an oversized box made, about three times the usual size, with the Peperami logo on it. We then hopped on a plane to Alicante and drove off in search of La Manga.

  When we got there, it was certainly impressive but seemed to be mainly geared towards golf – most of the England team could be seen playing as we drove in. I knew and cared little about football but I was pretty sure that playing golf was not the best preparation for the game, but hey, who was I to argue with Hoddle? The press conference was scheduled to take place on the terrace overlooking one of the golf courses. We got there early and sat in the front row, right in front of the table where Hoddle was to sit. Two hours later and the place began to fill up with sports reporters. There was clearly a pecking order as to who sat where and we got some dirty looks from crusty old hacks who assumed we were locals. We sat firm in our prime position and didn’t move. More and more microphones were placed on the table and it started to fill up. I didn’t want to place ours too early in case it got moved, so I waited until Hoddle and David Davies, the then head of the FA, strode out onto the terrace. I then plonked the mike dead-centre on the table. It was a ludicrous size and stupidly prominent but nobody did anything. Suddenly we realised that we were live on every news channel with this curious box taking up much of the screen. We got a bonus when Hoddle announced that he wouldn’t be picking Gazza for the team. This made international headlines and got much more exposure for our box than we had anticipated. I got another bonus when David Davies pointed at me during the Q&A session and said:

  ‘The gentleman from Peperami TV?’

  I busked it and suggested that Gazza had been dropped because of one too many kebabs? If he had kept to a strict diet of Peperami he would be fighting fit?

  Everyone laughed but you could see in Davies’s panicky eyes that he had marked us out as ne’er-do-wells. We legged it out after the press conference. On the drive back to Alicante we got a call from the ad agency back in London. They were over the moon.

  Two weeks later we broke into Bisham Abbey, the England team training ground, and barged our way through a practice session dressed as the Peperami sausage. It was all over the papers next day:

  Angry Sausage Breaches England Security . . .

  The ad agency later won advertising campaign of the year but we weren’t invited to the ceremony. This was probably for the best as, experience would later show, ceremonies and me didn’t mix too well.

  We finally heard from Channel 4. Trigger Happy TV was a go. We had a full series: six half-hours of telly to make. For the second time in a year, Sam and I walked out of Channel 4 trying to look cool and were once again unsuccessful. After the euphoria came the reality. What the hell were we going to fill six half-hours of telly with? It all felt rather terrifying so we went to the pub, a place where many a good idea often appeared. It was a long night in the Cock and Bottle in Notting Hill Gate.

  The following week, we turned up at Absolutely ready to start work. A normal comedy show would allocate a certain amount of time within which to film – essentially, however much time you could afford to hire professional camera and sound people for. Whatever you filmed in that period was what you then made into the final show. We had the luxury of being cheap. We bought two cameras and leased them back to the production along with a couple of radio mikes. We could pretty much keep filming until we had what we needed. This was a dangerous thing to happen, especially for someone as naturally lazy as myself. A normal production might look at the coming month and block out what was needed to film on every day. This would give everyone time to plan the shoot, clear and recce locations, get props, costumes . . . We were naive idiots and didn’t do anything like that. We were very disorganised. Maybe that was why it
worked?

  An average day in the Trigger Happy TV office would be: Sam and I would arrive on our Vespas (urban twats) and sit around in the office for half an hour, having coffee and laughing about stuff we’d done the night before. Then we’d start thinking about what we were going to do that day. I might have an idea about doing something as a traffic warden. We’d then call a couple of costume places. The largest, Angels and Bermans, were always a bit full of themselves. They wanted us to book in an appointment with a ‘fitter’. We were too impatient for this type of thing. We didn’t want a ‘costume’, we just wanted something that looked official. It didn’t even matter if it looked a bit crap. We eventually found this little place in Camden High Street called Escapade. It did costumes and fancy dress for parties. It was perfect and we got pretty much everything from there, which sometimes gave us problems. We used their two dog costumes for the fighting dog sketches. In hindsight we should have bought them but we didn’t. So often, when we needed them they were rented out. Even worse, sometimes we would get them only to find that the last renter had drunk too much the night before and clearly thrown up into the head . . .

  Anyway, we would drive up to Escapade in our Toyota Previa, the most essential component in our team. It had tinted windows and we would use it as a mobile film hide. Having selected the costume we would then argue about where to film. Normally it would be somewhere in West London where Sam and I lived, or somewhere in Soho near the office. By the time we had decided and got to the location it was usually lunchtime so we would all decamp for an hour. One of the big rules of filming was not to have lunch, as you really didn’t feel like doing much in the afternoon.

  We did a lot of the first series near the office. I hated traffic wardens. To me, the sign of a decent country was one where you could park anywhere you liked without finding yourself the main source of revenue for the local council. I loathed the way they wielded their silly powers with such intensity and seriousness. It was a hilarious dynamic to watch: people sucking up to them to avoid a ticket but then turning mental if this didn’t work.