Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  3. Save the Children. I’ve realised that most of these embarrassing stories are charity-based. Trust me, this is not a last-ditch attempt by me to boast about my ‘charidee’ work. It’s just that charity events give you the opportunity to do weird things and inevitably they take you right out of your comfort zone. Some people seem good at coping with this type of thing. I’m more your Rupert Everett running away from the Comic Relief version of The Apprentice. The one thing I did think I could properly contribute to, charity-wise, was towards helping the crisis in Syria. I’d grown up in neighbouring Lebanon, had travelled all over Syria and so, when Save the Children asked me to help, I agreed. At last, I would be doing something that was definitely helping and I would actually know what I was talking about. Save the Children asked me whether I’d become an ambassador for them and whether I’d be prepared to travel to Jordan to visit a refugee camp on the Jordanian/Syrian border. I said I’d be delighted and the wheels were set in motion. The problem with being an ‘ambassador’ is that you are expected to be diplomatic, have no political views and do nothing to embarrass the charity organisation in question. These have never been my strong points. On the day of the trip, I turned up at Heathrow and checked into my economy class seat to Amman. Having gone through security, I went into my automatic pre-flight routine that is almost ingrained within me. I am a creature of habit and I always go to the Salmon Bar to have a prawn cocktail and a glass of champagne. As far as I was concerned, I was off duty until I landed in Amman. As usual, I was very early (a bad habit) and had loads of time to kill, so I started tweeting. In one of my tweets, I took a photo of my meal, saying that I was off to Jordan and thought no more about it. By the time I landed in Amman all hell had broken loose. People had started complaining to Save the Children about my tweet, with the implication that their donations were paying for my glass of champagne and a prawn cocktail. I was a ‘luvvie’ on a ‘luvvie break’. It was untrue. I paid my way, but I was mortified. I should have thought about it more. I didn’t look good. I had been an ambassador for about three days and I had already screwed up on a monumental scale. It was time to pass the Ferrero Rochers around and apologise.

  4. The Body Shop. Occasionally, I get asked to host some award shows. This can be very lucrative but I always have to emphasise that I am not a stand-up comedian. This is because the contract always comes through with a phrase like: 8pm guests sit for dinner. 9pm Dom stands up and does 10 mins of material before awards start. I have to go back to them and point out that I’m happy being there, riffing with the audience, but I don’t have 10 mins of material. Normally this is OK, but sometimes it goes very wrong. I was offered the job of hosting The Body Shop Awards. I checked that they didn’t want me to do some stand-up and it was fine. I looked at the schedule of events – there was a Seventies disco band on stage, accompanying proceedings, and I just had to turn up, give out awards and compere the evening. It was perfect. I remember being slightly surprised that The Body Shop was having their awards in Birmingham but told myself not to be so discriminatory. The day before the event, I rented a terrible Seventies outfit and wrote some jokes about the different pungent smells that emanate onto the high street from Lush and The Body Shop. I thought I’d do a bit of shtick by pretending to have got the wrong dress code – this also got me out of wearing black tie, which I loathe. So I got to the venue, met the liaison person, who showed me into my dressing room, and that was that. Come the event and things went disastrously. I was introduced with much fanfare from the stage and I marched into the vast room from the back, winding my way through the diners. There was an awkward silence in the room. Once on stage, I made a lame joke about how everybody seemed to have got the wrong dress code as they were all in black tie. Again, total silence. So, as I felt the floor opening up beneath my feet I launched into some desperate ‘jokes’ about Lush and The Body Shop and how come employees weren’t allowed to work in places where people smoked but somehow it was OK for them to be in the olfactory hellhole that was The Body Shop? There was nothing. I just wanted to die. It was at this moment that my co-compere leant over and quietly let me know that these were the awards for The Body Shop, a magazine celebrating panel beaters and car workers in the Midlands . . . I never recovered.

  5. Richard & Judy. Not long after Trigger Happy TV had aired, I started getting all sorts of media requests. Among these was an offer to go onto This Morning to be interviewed by Richard and Judy. Now, at the time, Sam and I were still in our ‘punk’ stage, where we didn’t want to do any normal interviews or telly unless we subverted it somehow. We’d just done a live interview for T4, in which I appeared dressed as one of the Trigger Happy dogs and Sam had rushed into the studio halfway through the interview and attacked me while dressed as the other dog. We hadn’t told the show that we were going to do this and it all ended in glorious chaos. So when the offer for This Morning came in, we had a think about what I should do. In the end, I foolishly told Sam that I would faint live on air. We got to ITV Studios and Sam came with me to make sure that I didn’t wimp out. The closer we got to transmission the stronger the urge to run became, but I’d promised Sam . . . Finally, I was called onto set only to find that I had got the B team – Fern Britton and John Leslie. Richard and Judy were on holiday. I was livid and wanted to forget the whole thing but Sam insisted that I had to go through with it. I spent the first part of the interview warming up and looking a little woozy before finally crashing to the floor right in the middle of a live bit. I fell into Fern’s fulsome, pre-gastric band boobs and she panicked and they cut to a further VT of some Trigger Happy clips. Then, unbelievably they came back to the studio where I was pretending to have just come round while Fern nursed me and I apologised to one of her boobs. When they eventually moved off to do another segment I was handed to the ITV nurse, who tried to take me to the little clinic she had in the basement. I bolted at the first opportunity and made my escape out of the back and over a wall. It was all very curious. Over the following years I would do Richard & Judy several times; Richard would always be very complimentary about my stuff and was very nice to me. The weird thing, however, was that just before you went onto the show someone would come into the dressing room to tell you that the show was sponsored by Schwartz Herbs, and to remind you not to say anything offensive about that company. Until that very moment you had never thought about Schwartz Herbs but now, you went live on air with nothing but Schwartz Herbs running through your brain like some Tourette’s time bomb.

  The last fifteen years have not all been total humiliation, however. There have been incredible, exhilarating, mind-blowing moments. Most of all there have been times when I seriously thought I might actually die laughing. So, to conclude a rather therapeutic look back at surely the most unstable fifteen years in the history of showbiz, here is my list of the Top Five Things That Have Made Me Laugh the Most in the Last Fifteen Years.

  1. Sheep shagging. I once made a show called The Complainers for Channel 5. The original idea was really funny: find out what annoyed the British public the most and then get revenge on their behalf. It was going to be entertaining and feel-good, so I signed up. Then, as per usual, things went pear-shaped. Channel 5 seem to have a standing policy of changing whoever is in charge of the channel about once a month. The new person changed the idea of the show completely. Instead of a funny revenge show, they now wanted more of a Watchdog/consumer rights type of programme. I had not signed up for this and the production was divided between those hired to make funny stuff and new people who came from current affairs and kept telling us that we couldn’t legally get away with everything we were coming up with. So the production was a mess, but my little team ploughed on regardless. We wanted to do something about the rise of CCTV in the UK and someone told us about this town that had just spent a fortune on the most hi-tech system in the country. A researcher had been down there and told us that they had everywhere in the town covered. Not only that, they were particularly proud of an incredibly powerful camera tha
t could zoom right in on a hill about a mile above the town. The researcher told us that he had pointed to a speck on the hill and the camera operator had zoomed in to reveal a man walking his dog. Much to the chagrin of the researcher in question, this gave me an idea. Ten days later and I was in the control room of the town in question, filming an interview with the camera operator. I pointed at the powerful zoom camera screen. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, knowing full well what it was. The operator went into his spiel about how powerful the zoom was. I pointed at a dot on the distant hill and asked him whether he could zoom in on it? He duly did to reveal our researcher with his trousers down by his ankles apparently ‘pleasuring’ a sheep (a rather realistic fake one that we had made). The operator’s face was priceless. He stopped the interview as he tried to contact someone to apprehend the ‘suspect behaving in a lewd fashion with an animal on **** Hill . . .’ We kept rolling with tears of laughter running down my face. That researcher probably runs ITV now.

  2. More sheep. While we are on the subject of sheep, they have always been something that make me laugh. There is just something intrinsically ridiculous about them. My other favourite sheep-based joke (and a bit of a Far Side homage) was right at the end of World Shut Your Mouth, when the camera panned away from a sign requesting that walkers did not ‘worry’ a farmer’s flock of sheep. The camera steadily revealed the flock of sheep standing awkwardly in the middle of a field with me in the background, on the other side of a fence holding a megaphone to my mouth. ‘Now I don’t want to alarm you . . .’ I boomed at the sheep ‘. . . but I was in the pub the other night, and the farmer was in there, and he was quite depressed and talking about jacking in the whole farming thing and doing something else. Now, you don’t need me to tell you that this would not be good news for you guys . . .’ As I ‘worried’ the sheep, the door of the farm behind me flew open and the farmer himself appeared with a shotgun. I’d assumed that we’d obtained permission to film, but it seemed to have slipped everybody’s mind. The farmer was beyond apoplectic and didn’t appear to be aware of the concept of hidden camera comedy when I tried to explain the curious situation at gunpoint. I was lucky to get away unscathed and was warned that, should I be spotted on his land again, he would shoot first and ask questions later.

  3. Art. My favourite thing to do with my kids is to go to an art gallery and all gather round the fire extinguisher that invariably sits in the corner of every room. We peruse the object as though it was some lost precious masterpiece. It never fails. Pretty soon you are joined by other unsuspecting culture vultures, who will also start to stare and scratch their tiny goatees at this awesome piece of ‘installation’ art. We then move on, as the ‘chain’ has started – other gallery-goers will join the last ones etc. As well as making me laugh, I hope it teaches my kids to make their own minds up about what is or isn’t to be appreciated in this world. When I first came to the Cotswolds, we moved into a house next door to a beautiful riverside house that curated a biennial sculpture exhibition in their wonderful grounds. Some of the stuff shown was amazing but a lot of it was overpriced dross. Try as I might, I couldn’t resist. On the evening of the first day of the show I slipped into the grounds and crossed the bridge over the river into the meadow where some of the bigger exhibits sat. I chose a perfect spot and deposited a smeggy old pair of flip-flops carefully on a little stone plinth. I had made a sign to accompany my ‘work’. It was in the same style as the rest of the exhibition. It read: Shoes of Man, Earthwalker, Destroyer and Saviour – £139,000. I spent a wonderful next two weeks popping over daily to watch people stop and admire my flip-flops. They were never discovered by the organisers and stayed right until the end of the exhibition. I never saw them again – possibly a sharp-eyed collector purchased them? Perhaps I won the Turner Prize? I should have checked . . .

  4. Joe. When we flew to New York for a rather pointless filming week during the first series of Trigger Happy TV, Sam and I made a pilgrimage to the Carnegie Deli, a tourist trap that served stupidly large open sandwiches that would feed an entire African village. We were checking the menu and looking round at the hundreds of famous signed photos on the wall (my favourite was from Bozo the Clown, who was pictured staring creepily out of a bush in some park – he’d written ‘See you around . . . like a bagel’ on his photo). As we took everything in, the waiter approached our table. He was what you might call a smart alec. He had the whole New Yawk patter and was a bit patronising to the two Brits in front of him. I wanted a salt beef sandwich and asked for one. ‘You mean pastrami right, buddy? That’s what we call it over here, you Limeys need to learn to speak American . . .’ He laughed the big laugh of a man who found himself very amusing. Sam and I looked at each other. I stood up and looked at the man intently. ‘Sir . . . I can only apologise for this misunderstanding, it’s just that we are from the UK and only just arrived here. I am mortified by this and can only hope you accept my most sincere apologies.’ The waiter looked at me as though facing a mental patient. ‘Sure, buddy . . . Forget about it . . . It’s no big deal . . .’ He wandered off, shaking his head in disbelief. When he returned with the sandwich, I stood up again and formally apologised at length once more. The waiter looked irritated and told us to forget about it. ‘Seriously, it’s not a big deal . . .’ When we finished the meal and were leaving, I went up to him again and apologised. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it – how could I make such a stupid mistake? I should have done some research and known what words to use . . . This has seriously ruined my holiday . . .’ The waiter was by now convinced that he had a lunatic on his hands and politely said goodbye, telling us that it was ‘all OK . . . Seriously’. That night we rang the deli from the hotel and asked to speak to the waiter whose name, we knew, was Joe. When he came on the line, I explained that I was having difficulty sleeping because of the embarrassment of the linguistic mix-up that morning. ‘Is there anything I can do to make things right?’ I asked Joe, who was now rapidly losing his rag. ‘Listen, buddy, it’s NOT a problem, seriously, get over it, who gives a shit . . .’ Joe hung up. Over the next week, we rang him about nine further times, sent two letters of apology plus an enormous bouquet of flowers. I still write to him once a year.

  5. Pig/Prawn. I once had an idea for a sketch after we kept driving past a London caravan that sold fish. The joke was that I would approach the counter and ask the man whether he had crab claws. When he replied in the negative, I would lift my arms above the level of the counter to reveal enormous claws on the end of each of them. ‘I have!’ I would shout and then run away. It still makes me laugh, it’s just so stupid. I’m not sure why we never did it – it was probably something simple like we couldn’t find any crab claws to rent. Although we had some costumes made, we were often a bit lazy in this respect. We had the number of every costume shop in London and we would scour them for anything we needed and sometimes for inspiration. We did once rent a prawn costume from a shop in North London only to find, when it arrived, that it looked like a pig. We rang the store and they assured us that it was a prawn costume. So we took it out on the street and asked passers-by – they almost all said that it looked like a pig. With the certainty of our market research, we returned the costume and refused to pay on the grounds that we’d wanted a prawn and had got a pig. The owner, an irate man, went mental and told us to leave and never come back. From then on, whenever we were bored, we would ring the store and ask whether they had a pig costume for rent? The owner would reply that he unfortunately had no such costume. We would pause for a second before telling him that ‘friends’ had mentioned that he might have a prawn costume for rent that greatly resembled a pig – might that be available? The owner would go nuclear every time and hurl abuse at us before slamming the phone down. It still makes me laugh ten years on – in fact, I might give him a ring now . . .