by Dom Joly
When Eamonn Holmes came on I spent the whole interview asking him anodyne questions like, ‘What time do you get up?’ and ‘Do you use an alarm clock?’ The next day the Mirror printed a whole page asking whether these were the worst, dullest questions in chat show history. They were. They were meant to be.
I also seem to remember that we had Nicholas Parsons sitting in a glass case with the words ‘Break Glass In Case Of Guest Emergency’ on it, but I might be making that up (I’m not).
In hindsight, I think I was suffering from Radioheaditis: make something very popular and then get freaked out by success and wilfully implode by making stuff that nobody really understands or likes. I should have got Coldplayitis: much simpler – repeat but bigger.
I’d set out to make a show where twenty per cent of the viewers believed it was real while the rest understood it was a spoof. The reality was flipped round and eighty per cent believed it was real and that I was a massive wanker. I am, unfortunately, rather good at playing being a wanker. I could tell that things were not going well at the BBC as Alan Yentob stopped popping in – success garners many friends but nobody hangs around to watch you die. There was the stench of death about me and people were starting to distance themselves at a fast trot.
I went onto the Radio 4 show Front Row to be interviewed by Mark Lawson. I was rather thrilled to be asked onto it. Three minutes in and I was not quite so thrilled. The general gist of the interview was: ‘What has gone wrong?’ He ended by telling me that he knew loads of people who had loved Trigger Happy TV but were now loathing the shouty person on the chat show. I checked again that he knew this was a spoof character and not actually me? He just looked back blankly at me. The studio smelt of failure and farts. I pushed open the heavy soundproofed door and escaped. Just to reinforce how badly things had got: John Leslie, the former Blue Peter presenter who was fighting off rape allegations in Ulrika Jonsson’s autobiography, then harangued me in a bar. He leant over and asked me how I’d screwed up so badly: ‘You were top of your game and then . . . nothing.’ It was bad enough having someone confirm your status in public, but when it was John Leslie then you knew you were in trouble.
Then, another hammer blow: Sam announced that he was getting out. He wanted to break our three-series deal with the BBC and leave. I sort of knew this was coming as he had a lot less to do on the studio show and he wanted to start doing his own things but . . . I felt very abandoned and really let down. We’d signed up to do this together and to me he was jumping a sinking ship. I’d gone fifty–fifty with Sam on everything we’d done together and it had worked well. There was something indefinable about the tension between us that created great stuff. He went off to direct adverts. I’m sure the pay was good but I knew that he’d never have as much fun as we’d had.
There was to be no third series of This Is Dom Joly. This left me with one series left to make for the Beeb as part of my dying deal. I decided that, much as I’d been loath to make another hidden camera show, I needed to give them a ‘banker’, something that I could be fairly confident would work and be a success. So I made a show called World Shut Your Mouth.
The basic premise was that we would do jokes all around the world. I was just blagging free trips abroad again. It’s a problem that I’ve always suffered from: wanderlust. If someone is prepared to pay for my habit, I binge. It seemed that, having half-done BBC Two and conclusively done BBC Three, it was time for me to be handed over to BBC One like some increasingly toxic pass-the-parcel.
I dimly remember having a meeting with Jon Plowman and Lorraine Heggessey, the then head of BBC One, in which they said that they wanted some family-friendly type of show. They even gave me an example of the sort of thing that they wanted: outside a cinema showing a pirate film would be . . . a big queue of pirates. I stared at them and nodded in a non-committal sort of way, and then wandered off to make the show I wanted to make.
To be fair, they probably could have guessed that I was not making the show they wanted early on when I asked for permission to visit the Seven Wonders of the World in one trip, to film the six opening scenes. I would travel to the Taj Mahal, stand in front of it for ten seconds or so before declaring, ‘Now that . . . is shit . . .’ and walk off. That was it. To make it worse, I decided that we should film nothing else on that trip so that the whole point of the journey was solely these scenes. I felt it was comedically pure. I was approaching maximum self-indulgence.
Nobody at the BBC stopped me. Three of us flew to Beijing, did a that is shit on the Great Wall of China, followed by the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the Colosseum and (I’m not sure why) the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The last one let the side down a little but it was a seriously out-there start to every show.
Another trip I made was to Newfoundland, the lonely island off the east coast of Canada. I’d had a Post-it note stuck to my desk for ages that just had the words ‘Frighten an Eskimo’ on it. Without doing a vast amount of research, I hopped onto a plane headed for Newfoundland. The immigration guy at St John’s airport asked me my reason for visiting Canada?
‘I’m here to frighten an Eskimo,’ I replied cheerfully.
‘We don’t have any Eskimos in Newfoundland, sir . . .’ replied the baffled immigration guy.
‘Oh . . .’ I said less cheerfully.
I decided that the joke could still be done with a non-Eskimo. I just needed to find someone ice-fishing in the middle of nowhere. We drove out of St John’s and drove and drove out into the tundra without much idea of where we were headed. We just wanted to get somewhere remote. We had to stop in the town of Dildo. The inhabitants seemed blissfully unaware of the comedic value of their town name.
After about four hours’ drive we finally came over a hill to see an enormous frozen lake in front of us with, joy of joys, an Eskimo-looking-type fellow ice-fishing right in the middle.
We parked the car and the cameraman set up in his position. When he was ready he gave me the signal and I crept slowly towards him across the frozen lake. As the distance shortened between us, the camera slowly zoomed in and you could see that I was holding a large pair of cymbals. Finally, I got right behind the fisherman, who had not heard me approach. I lifted the cymbals and smashed them together. The Eskimo/fisherman jumped out of his skin, and I turned and legged it back to the van. I jumped in, the crew jumped in, and we all sped back to St John’s and flew home. The footage revealed the fisherman to have just stood and watched in stupefaction as I ran away. I long to know what was going on in his mind. Were he an Eskimo he would have had over fifty words for snow, but possibly only one for me: ‘Asshole!’
Another idea that I’d long wanted to do was to pretend to fly over the Grand Canyon with a big rocket strapped to my back. As a kid, I had always been a touch obsessed with people like Evel Knievel. They were always jumping the Grand Canyon in elaborate motorbikes or machines. Hidden camera jokes work best when there is plausibility to them. People hate traffic wardens and so, when they are faced with one trying to give them a ticket for something that they know is one hundred per cent wrong, this makes for good telly. Similarly, people associate the Grand Canyon with stupid stunts and so I knew that they would most likely accept the premise of a man wandering about with a rocket attached to his back.
First, though, we had to get a rocket. This involved one of our researchers having to organise the construction of said rocket somewhere in Las Vegas. This being Nevada, with very permissive gun laws, he had some problem explaining that no, he didn’t want a real rocket, just a prop. Eventually someone was found who would make us a seven-foot rocket, with a red nose cone and the word ACME (it stands for A Company that Makes Everything, in case you wondered) down the side.
We needed a helicopter to film some of the scenes, so we rented one in Vegas that took us up to the canyon. Nothing brings out the inner child more than hopping into a chopper, especially when the pilot buzzes you down the Vegas Strip before heading out towards the desert. Once there, we g
ot set up and waited for the rocket to arrive. A runner in a rental van was driving it to the canyon from Las Vegas. We waited and waited . . . all rather conscious of the ticking clock on the helicopter rental meter. After a couple of hours we were starting to get worried. There was no sign of the rocket. Finally we managed to get hold of the runner. He was under arrest at a police roadblock by the Hoover Dam. In this post-9/11 America, there was much security around ‘target sites’ and the Hoover Dam was an important one. When the policeman had stopped our van and asked the young runner what he was carrying in the back, he was astonished to be told that it was a large rocket. Despite him showing said rocket and its clear non-functionality, the poor kid was arrested and we eventually had to send the production manager down to rescue him.
Our next problem was that the only part of the Grand Canyon that we could film in was on Injun’ territory. The rest of the canyon was National Parks and they would not let us film there. Despite having fully explained what we were up to on the phone from London, the Native American official sent to deal with us just couldn’t understand that we were not doing this for real. He kept going on about insurance and police involvement in assisted murder. By the time we had explained it all, it was getting late and we needed to get a serious move on. It worked brilliantly. The moment my character, British Bob, stood on the edge of the canyon with the rocket strapped to his back we attracted a sizeable crowd of tourists seemingly eager to watch a man crash and burn – we even got one of them to light the fuse.
For the TV joke we needed a second act and so we flew down to the floor of the canyon, smashed up the rocket, slashed my clothing and I then lay on the ground, supposedly unconscious, by the remains of the rocket, waiting for a hiking group to come upon us. As it so happened there weren’t too many people wandering past. To get to the bottom of the canyon was quite a struggle and had taken some serious doing. We were starting to panic – light was fading – the helicopter meter was ticking . . . Then fortune favoured us. Out of nowhere appeared this lovely old couple from the UK who looked as though they had just popped out for a walk on the village common rather than appear on the floor of the Grand Canyon. They fully believed my story, offered me a cup of tea and tried very hard to stop me climbing back up to the top and ‘. . . have another go’. God bless them.
When I returned from the US trip I took a couple of weeks off. Stacey was heavily pregnant with our second child and he/she was due any day. Six days later, our son Jackson was born in the John Radcliffe in Oxford. Stacey had to have a caesarean section and I followed her nervously into the operating theatre, trying my best to hold it together while someone cut her stomach open. It all got a bit surreal. As the operation proceeded, a nurse suddenly asked me whether I was Dom Joly. Slightly distracted, I replied in the affirmative.
‘I went to the Dragon School with you,’ said the nurse.
I stared at her for a moment and then recognised her.
‘Oh yes . . .’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘You went to the Dragon School?’ asked the surgeon, looking up from my wife’s innards.
‘My boy goes there . . . It’s a good school,’ he continued.
‘Fooorrr fuccckkk’s ssssake,’ screamed Stacey weakly. She really had had enough of the UK’s old boy/girl network.
To finish things off, our insurance company later informed us that they had no record of the anaesthetist who worked on Stacey that day.
‘According to our records he doesn’t exist . . .’
Sometimes real life got a bit too close to hidden camera . . .
We brought Jackson home, but I couldn’t hang around for too long. We were still mid-production and, although the budget apparently wouldn’t stretch to non-stop foreign holidays, I had to be back filming in the UK.
I wanted to film outside London and chose to do quite a bit in the Exmoor area. My mum grew up there and not only did I know it quite well but there was a superb mix of topography to film in. Within an hour’s drive you had moorland, thick woods, picturesque villages and seaside towns. We based ourselves at the Luttrell Arms in the quaint village of Dunster. This was a mistake, as the place had a lovely secret garden at the back, it was sunny and they served a very potent local brew called Cheddar. We spent a lot of the time down there ‘totally cheddared’. We did get some stuff done.
I’d already filmed here for Trigger Happy TV – it was where I’d done the strange sea captain who wandered around, randomly lying to old ladies about losing his wife and dog to the sea. For World Shut Your Mouth we filmed a lot in Horner Wood, just up from Porlock Weir. There was something primeval about the place and it had a strange atmosphere to it. In Trigger Happy TV we’d filmed things like the Troll Bridge there, but this time we positively carpet-bombed the place. For a brief period, anyone wandering through the woods could have been accosted by me as a very happy/depressed Goth, a lonely druid who needed to chat, having a fight to the death with a life-sized badger, as the world’s fattest ninja rolling down the hill to land in a heap in front of them, a lonesome squeegee merchant who had set up traffic lights in the middle of nowhere . . . There was something about the area that really clicked with hidden camera.
The weirdest thing we filmed there was my random Scotsman. I had an idea for a Scotsman approaching people and enquiring as to whether they were wondering what was under his kilt? My disguise was great: violent ginger hair and a full beard plus kilt kit. For some reason that escapes me now I decided to hang an uncooked chicken from my belt to dangle under the kilt (over pants). There then followed a frankly uncomfortable hour or so of filming in which I would approach ramblers and ask them (in a quite awful Scottish accent): ‘I bet yoo’re wooonderring what’s oonder me kilt?’
What they were actually wooonderring was whether I was about to expose my genitalia to them. So, when I lifted the kilt to show the uncooked chicken, there was a reaction of confusion mixed with relief. ‘It’s a chicken that ay’lll be cooking tonight for my suupper . . .’ I proclaimed in an accent that was rapidly drifting towards Ireland.
I was astonished that anybody ever signed a consent form. My accents were always the subject of much mirth to the crew on shoots. Truth be told, they are mostly pretty awful. I do a passable West Country, a dodgy Cockney, a very good Dutch but the rest tend to wander all over the continents, starting in Belgium and sometimes travelling as far as South Africa by the end of a sketch. It never really bothered me too much – most Brits class people as ‘foreign’ and don’t normally bother to work out which part of ‘foreign’ they’re actually from.
After three months of filming, we were finished. I retired into the edit suite with Dave Frisby to put the series together. It was less bitty than Trigger Happy TV – the sketches were longer and so editing it all was a slightly easier process. When I’d finished I sent the shows over to the BBC and waited . . .
I heard nothing for quite a long time and, as the show had been scheduled to air fairly soon, I was getting worried. Finally the call came and I went to see Jon Plowman, the head of comedy. I could sense something was wrong the moment I entered his office. I sat down, made the usual small talk and waited for the blow. When it came it was worse than I’d expected.
‘Well, we’ve seen the show and . . . to be blunt, it’s really not a BBC One show. It’s too dark, too weird, it’s got terribly depressing music on it. Lorraine doesn’t like it. In short, it’s not going to be shown on the channel in the foreseeable future . . .’
I sat there, absolutely stunned. After my inept handling of 100 Things and then the failure of the chat show, this was the final nail in the coffin. I could hardly have screwed up at the BBC more if I’d staggered around the building drunk, naked and randomly firing an AK47 at people.
Back in Jon Plowman’s office, however, there was a long awkward silence before I made my excuses.
‘I’m sorry about this, Dom. I’ll let you know what happens next,’ said Plowman. He never did. Like the rest of the BBC suits, the stench of dea
th about me was now so overpowering that it was the most they could do not to hold handkerchiefs over their faces as they spoke to me. So nobody did speak to me.
I can’t remember much of that period. It’s all a bit of a blur (a title, for the record, that I gave Alex James from Blur, a fellow Indy writer, for his autobiography). I know that I was really unhappy. I think I just came into the BBC and sat in my office in a funk every day for about two months with nothing to do. Finally, I found out from a newspaper that World Shut Your Mouth was to go out on BBC One, but there was very little publicity about it. The show was being buried and me with it, and there was nothing I could do. World Shut Your Mouth went out, got respectable ratings but made very little noise.
I remember being told on the phone, after about the third episode had aired, that the BBC had confirmed there would be no second series. This hardly came as a surprise but still nobody broached the subject of my future and what would happen next. I had a three-series deal. I had made three series, so now what? The answer came in a very BBC fashion when one day my pass simply didn’t work at the gates and I couldn’t get in. I had been electronically terminated.
I gained access to the building by signing in as a guest and parked my car in the horseshoe next to Jonathan Ross’s special parking place. I took the lift up to my office, got a box and put everything into it. There were photos, some knick-knacks and the big mobile phone from Trigger Happy TV. I wandered downstairs and back into the horseshoe, where I opened the boot and put all my belongings in it. It would have made a fabulous pap shot, an ignominious end to an ignominious period. I drove out of the BBC gates and out of mainstream show business. I wondered what on earth I was going to do now. In four years, I had come from nowhere to the precarious top of my game and now I had tumbled back down into the abyss and I had no idea what lay at the bottom.