Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  I got into the main room and it was Insaneville. There were so many famous people milling about, chatting to each other like some exclusive club that I was definitely not a member of – there was Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, David Beckham, oh look Robert Downey Jr . . .

  I escaped to the terrace where I downed about nine glasses of fizzy courage. To my left stood Ant and Dec chatting away to each other, inseparable as ever. Didn’t they ever get bored of each other? Surely there must be one moment when Ant or Dec turned to Ant or Dec and said: ‘Oh, piss off, you’re so clingy . . .’ It seemed not. Ant howled with laughter at something that Dec said. It was probably: ‘Hey, isn’t that the bloke with the big phone? Wosssiisssname? You know . . . Dim Jelly. What the hell is he doing here?’

  I had another couple of champagnes for good measure and then braved the melee inside. I found Simon, who was already at the table, and I plonked myself in my allocated chair. Alex James sat down and, because I was nervous as well as a serious Blur fan, I made some comment about him looking like Jim Morrison days before his demise. It didn’t go down well with either Alex or his wife, although Simon howled with laughter. I’ve never been the greatest polite conversationalist. The more nervous I get, the ruder I become. It’s nearly always funny but at someone else’s expense. I’ve always been good at that and it’s not something I’m proud of.

  A waiter poured me a large glass of white wine and I downed it. Simon Kelner was still laughing at my comments. This was bad news, as it only encouraged me. I can remember very little of the rest of the evening. I know I behaved very badly because I received a letter the following day informing me that I was banned from the event for life. I can dimly remember shouting things at anyone who received an award. I remember people on the next-door table telling me to be quiet. I remember Stacey with her head in her hands. The two things I really remember are so embarrassing that I often hope they are mere hallucinations.

  First there was me shouting: ‘Oi oi, lads, backs to the wall, wiggy man is here . . .’ as Elton John came up to say hello to Alex.

  And then there was me throwing a large table decoration at Jonny Wilkinson while shouting: ‘Oi, Jonny, catch this, you boring bastard . . .’

  I was shouting ‘oi’ a lot that night, but that was the least of my worries. A combination, I think, of mild depression, alcohol and nerves had turned me into a posh Danny Dyer. Oh, the shame. Although, to be fair, Wilkinson has to be one of the dullest men on the planet, but he had done nothing to offend me. I was, and am, a big Elton John fan (apart from The Lion King, which is music to kill yourself to) and can’t believe I behaved like that in front of him. In the very unlikely event that either of them are reading this, I would like to apologise unreservedly.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: ‘Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.’ I’m not sure that he was specifically referring to my situation, but when it comes to heroes and me, I think they’re best kept at arm’s length. I’m just not very good with them.

  Chapter 5

  BBC

  I think I knew that things weren’t going to go very well at the BBC from the very first day. I’d been given a parking permit, something I later found out was a highly prized object at the Beeb. I arrived at the car park on Wood Lane and drove in. It was quite a tight squeeze as spaces were like gold dust. I finally managed to navigate the car halfway into a space before realising that I wasn’t going to make it. I reversed and slammed straight into a car that had been trying to slip past me. I’m not sure whose fault it was, most probably mine – it normally is – but I think I was more nervous than I realised and my stress levels were high. I got out of the car and gave the driver of the other vehicle a volley of abuse along the lines of needing glasses, questionable birthright and general fuckwittery. Twenty minutes later and I was in my new office in Television Centre and having a chat with Myfanwy Moore, my old boss at Paramount who now had the unlucky task of trying to make things work for me at the Beeb.

  ‘Did you have an incident in the car park?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I reversed into some moron who shouldn’t be allowed to drive.’ I was astonished at how quickly news travelled in these parts.

  ‘That “moron” was the Head of Light Entertainment . . .’ said Myf.

  I gulped. I had a bad feeling already: this wasn’t going to end well. That afternoon, a man turned up in my office and asked me what colour I’d like the room painted. I hadn’t given this much thought; in fact I was quite surprised at having the option. I had a think for a moment before going for a deep red. Some say that red on the walls drives you mad – possibly this had something to do with the next couple of years? Two days later, I realised that being at the BBC was going to be very different from Channel 4 when someone sent me a snippet from the Daily Mirror. It was a piece about me that read: ‘Trigger Happy Star Sees Red – Dom Joly has refused to start work at the BBC until everything in his new suite of offices is painted red.’

  I laughed, but I knew that I was headed for trouble. I got myself into enough scrapes without having newspapers start to make stuff up about me. There was a definite feeling that, as you were at the BBC being paid for by the licence fee, you were public property. This was not a good place to be for someone like me.

  I was very keen to do something different at the Beeb. I’d started to pitch a show called 100 Things to Do Before You Die at Channel 4 just before I left. It was going to be like someone had given the show to the wrong person – no skydiving and seeing Niagara Falls, this was going to be offbeat and very weird. Channel 4 had liked it so much that they’d set up a website for people to send in suggestions. I pitched the show to Jane Root at BBC Two and, although I could see that she wasn’t that keen on it, the lesson here was: when you’re hot you can get anything through. She commissioned the show and we were off.

  I think the first thing we did was: Shoot fish in a barrel, which involved my standing on a chair in a field firing a shotgun into a barrel full of water (no fish).

  Then we did: Go see your favourite old teacher. This had me meeting an elderly actress (playing the teacher) in her home in a very awkward encounter where clearly she had no memory of me whatsoever. The rushes were looking very strange but interesting – there was definite promise in the thing.

  We’d been filming for about a month when I happened to open the Guardian and see that Channel 5 had announced their new schedule. Prominent among their shows was 100 Things to Do Before You Die. I couldn’t believe it. The people in charge of Channel 4 comedy had just moved to Channel 5 and they appeared to have nicked my idea. Normally you can’t really prove this sort of thing, but the fact that Channel 4 had actually made a website based on the idea was pretty conclusive. I was so angry I ended up blabbing to someone at the Evening Standard and the story went public. This was not the best way to keep friends in television but I’d never been good at keeping my mouth shut. Channel 5 vehemently denied the whole thing and claimed it was a ‘coincidence’. Yeah right. In the end Channel 5 changed the name to 99 Things to Do Before You’re 30, so that was OK then . . .

  Their show was scheduled to come out before us and would steal any thunder mine might possess. I reached what I thought was a sensible conclusion and decided to stop making my show and try something else. I genuinely thought this was the sensible and most responsible thing to do. I wanted to make the best, funniest show I could, which was now not going to be this one. I hadn’t understood the way the BBC worked, however, and my decision had the same effect as a dirty bomb going off in White City tube station. The BBC, I soon discovered, was a giant lumbering monolith that did not take kindly to disorganised, ‘punk’ programme-makers like Sam and me. It was quickly made clear to us that our cards were marked. My decision to stop making the BBC Two show had complicated budget ramifications that were still plaguing me when I left two years later and they asked for money back. I should have just ploughed on – it seemed that nobody actually cared what a show was like; it just needed to not mess up t
he Kafkaesque entanglements that constituted the BBC system.

  Meanwhile, I got an offer from America. I had agreed to the sale of Trigger Happy TV all over the world with a substituted (soundalike) soundtrack created by some guy in a basement on a Yamaha – it was awful, but the music was prohibitively expensive to clear worldwide and I had little choice. Curiously, Germany was the only country to pay for the entire soundtrack as it was. I’d held out in America, however. MTV wanted to buy the series and I’d said no, hoping that someone would manage to show the thing with the proper soundtrack. When nothing else seemed to be on offer, I eventually agreed for Comedy Central to show the butchered version.

  The show did very well in the States and they asked me to come over and do a US version. I had mentally moved on from Trigger Happy TV and didn’t really fancy upping sticks to the States. Looking back now, I can’t believe I made that decision. I should have been all over it and moved to the States and made a proper, controlled version of the show. As it was, Comedy Central came back and asked whether they could make their own version. They offered some serious money, and Sam and I agreed. The deal was that we would go out to the States, film a couple of sketches for the series and that we would executive produce. Comedy Central handed over the production to a company that immediately started making the series. The show was being made before we’d even realised it had started.

  We flew out and met a couple of the people who were to be ‘me’ in the show. They were young and keen, but something about the whole thing was already not feeling right. Sam and I filmed some scenes in Miami and New York that were OK – not classic, but a good start. I was then taken into the Comedy Central HQ in New York to do some interviews. While I was there they asked whether I’d like to see the first show. I was very surprised – we hadn’t even finished filming our bits yet, let alone looked at anybody else’s. What did they mean by the ‘first show’? I was told that the first one was going out that week. I was gobsmacked. I assumed that Sam and I would be in the edit as usual, making decisions, guiding the thing. They sat me down and showed me the first show. It was so awful that I actually assumed it was a joke at the beginning. It was like somebody had spoofed Trigger Happy TV. Random bad costumes along with appalling, soulless indie music haphazardly slapped onto scenes that occasionally went into slo-mo for no reason. It was horrific. It was a car crash. It was a valuable lesson about keeping control when dealing with America.

  I remember staggering back to our hotel, the Soho Grand. I was incredibly depressed. I got into my room and looked out of the window to see a twelve-storey billboard with Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G on it, staring down at me. We’d started off together at Paramount but he knew exactly what he wanted and had moved to the States to single-mindedly pursue it. We’d been half-arsed and didn’t really know what we wanted and we had paid the price. Bugger.

  Sam and I flew home and asked for our names to be taken off the series. We were mortified. The US version tanked, as it should have done, since it was so awful. Only in hindsight do I now look back and think about all the things we should have done differently. People still come up and say things like: ‘I loved Trigger Happy but not the American version . . .’ Trust me, I know . . .

  If I thought about it too much it could drive me mad.

  I think I have thought about it too much . . .

  The BBC was about to launch their new ‘youth’ channel, BBC Three, and I was introduced to the energetic head of it, Stuart Murphy. He was very keen for Sam and me to do a show for his channel. We talked about Dead Air, the pilot we’d made at Channel 4 before we left. We wanted to make a show like that: weird, offbeat and silly. Stuart green-lit it, and Sam and I went off to try and work out what it might be. This was when I made another giant mistake. Instead of making the show as a spoof character with a fake name (à la Alan Partridge) I opted to be a spoof character but use my real name. Thus This Is Dom Joly was born. The joke to me was obvious. This clearly wasn’t Dom Joly, but I think I expected everyone to know this. They didn’t. All they knew was that the bloke from Trigger Happy TV, who had been in every scene but you never really got to know, now had his own chat show and appeared to be a monumental wanker. To be fair, I probably am a bit of a wanker, but the wanker I played on This Is Dom Joly was not me – different wanker. I should have just called the show This Is Jom Doly and it would have all made sense. But I didn’t.

  I was an idiot.

  The concept of the show was that I, like everyone who achieved overnight success, had been offered a stupendous deal by the BBC and decided that I should have my own bloated, egotistical chat show. I made yet another mistake when trying to explain this concept in press interviews by using Johnny Vaughan as an example. I thought Johnny Vaughan was an amazing TV presenter and he’d been very supportive of Trigger Happy TV when he was on The Big Breakfast, but I’d heard terrible stories about him at the Beeb from people who’d worked on his show. I made my usual mistake of opening my big mouth about it. It got very bad – on the launch night of BBC Three he refused to do any links with me despite my show being one of the centrepieces of the new channel. This was all ahead of me, however . . .

  Personally, I’d never had any real interest in having a chat show or interviewing people. My specialty was mucking about. We split the thing into two parts. There was the studio element in which I ‘interviewed’ guests and hosted a real band. Then there were the VT elements in which we filmed a fake video diary of my life. The VTs were like filming a spoof version of The Osbournes, and I used it to get loads of cameos. I set up the premise that I lived in a house with a Cato-like manservant who would constantly attack me and that Michael Winner was my neighbour.

  We filmed scenes in which I knocked a clown unconscious at a children’s party (with Suggs from Madness), tried to sell my house to real punters adding a ‘celebrity’ surcharge to the price, got furious at ‘papped’ photos of me and Vanessa Feltz on a date, and embarked on a stag party dressed as Ali G with Mark Owen from Take That as a confused guest.

  My enduring memory of the video diaries was a day we spent filming at Paradise Wildlife Park in Hertfordshire. The joke was that I’d adopted some animals and had turned up with my ‘entourage’, demanding to see them. The wildlife park was in on it but none of the real punters had a clue what was going on. We’d booked Lemmy from Motörhead to be part of my entourage. He agreed on the rock ‘n’ roll condition that he be picked up in a chauffeur-driven limo and that there be a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the back. It must be very tiring, being Lemmy.

  On the day there was a mix-up and one of the extras for a later scene turned up beaming and a bit pissed in a chauffeur-driven limo. Half an hour later, a very, very angry Lemmy arrived sober, in a beaten-up minicab. We had to spend a long time placating him.

  Later that afternoon I was filming a scene with the actor playing my dad. We were chatting by the tiger enclosure with a large beast just on the other side of the fence from us. I was in mid-sentence when the tiger lifted its tail and a powerful stream of hot tiger piss hit my face with considerable force. I was temporarily blinded, stank to high heaven and remain astonished that this clip has never found its way to one of those TV Blooper shows.

  The studio element was very different. I wanted bands on to play live. This was great, because I could get some of my favourites on. The problem was that I then had to interview them and behave like a total wanker. Not all the bands, like the public, understood that this was an act. The Cure really got it. I’d met Robert Smith before, of course, and they eventually played twice on the show. Nevertheless, each time they came on I would do some awkward interview with Robert Smith, and I would get a barrage of online abuse from Cure fans who thought I was doing it for real.

  Over the two series of the show we had Suede, The Waterboys, Ian Brown, The Cure, Gomez, Gary Numan, Grandaddy, Mercury Rev. I found myself doing surreal things like duetting with Marianne Faithfull on ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’. I adored the song and I’d organised
for a false floor on the stage to collapse halfway through when I stepped on it. Unbeknownst to me, a roadie had unwittingly walked onto it and the thing had collapsed just before the show. The entire studio audience knew about the joke but I wasn’t told this by production. I was therefore very surprised when there was total silence when it happened during the show.

  The green room for This Is Dom Joly was always fun. After the show I would get gloriously drunk as I was so ripped on nervous adrenaline. I particularly embarrassed myself with the band Gomez. I was happily drunk-chatting to them when the guy who sounded like he should have been eighty years old but appeared to be only sixteen said: ‘You’re on fire . . .’

  I thanked him profusely for his kind words and told him that I thought their new stuff was very good as well.

  ‘No, I mean you’re actually on fire . . . Your jacket . . .’

  I think someone had passed around a joint and I’d taken an extra-large toke on the thing. This had left me a little confused, as dope tended to do, and I’d put my lit, normal cigarette into the top pocket of my suit jacket where it proceeded to smoulder quite dramatically. I was incredibly embarrassed but took the cig out and smoked it like nothing had happened. I could see in Gomez’s eyes that they weren’t sure if I was mad or stupid.

  One night the sound man came up to me and made me listen to a very amusing sequence in which Marianne Faithfull, who had forgotten she was still wearing a radio mike, had wandered off to the bathroom to ‘powder her nose’. She’d ended up dropping the mike down the loo. This was a two-grand mistake but made for some very funny listening back in the office.

  Guests were random and hard to come by. We pretty much took who we could.

  David Dickinson was all perma-tan, signet rings and packets of B&H, and suddenly dropped his cheeky chappy persona just before the show and snarled threateningly: ‘We won’t be mentioning anything about me and prison, right?’ Up to that moment I had been unaware he had ever ‘done time’ but of course all I then wanted to do was ask him about it.