Here Comes the Clown Read online

  Here Comes the Clown

  Also by Dom Joly:

  Look at Me, Look at Me

  The Dark Tourist

  Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2015 by Dom Joly

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Dom Joly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85720-767-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-769-2

  The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

  Typeset in the UK by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  For Stacey,

  without whom nothing would have been possible

  ‘Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate’

  Emily Dickinson

  ‘Some call it fun, some call it mayhem’

  Cabbage

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 Mr Gund

  2 Trigger Happy TV (Red)

  3 Trigger Happy TV (Purple & Green)

  4 No More Heroes

  5 BBC

  6 Excellent Adventures

  7 Happy Hours

  8 Reality Bites

  9 Wanderlust

  10 Help Wanted

  11 Now What?

  12 Fool Britannia

  13 Here We Go Again

  Epilogue

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue

  I loathe prologues. Everybody loathes prologues. Why do prologues exist?

  Here’s my prologue.

  In 2004 I wrote a spoof autobiography called Look at Me, Look at Me. It pretty much documented the real events of my life up to Trigger Happy TV and used these as a basis for some fantastical storytelling. My intention was to write a sort of Munchausen-Zelig-type story of my life but I think some people might have been confused as to whether it was fact or fiction, despite the early appearance of a talking dog.

  In Here Comes the Clown there will, I hope, be no such confusion. I take up the story from 14 January 2000, when the very first episode of Trigger Happy TV aired on Channel 4 and everything changed. Suddenly, I was famous and there was no need for fanciful storytelling. Reality was now weirder than any fiction I could conjure up. This is the story of what happened next (and just before).

  This is not an autobiography, more snippets of recollections (most probably inaccurate) from my adventures in show business. I read a lot of biographies and the weird thing about them is that they tend (apart from the ones written by 19-year-old starlets) to have an arc in which you already know the ending.

  However wonderful things appear at any particular moment, you know that life is probably going to throw some terrible spanner in the works – a marriage breaks up, you get addicted to drugs, you contract a case of West Nile disease, you are knocked over and killed by a milkman . . . It rarely ends well.

  As I write this I have no idea of my arc – so far, so good, but life normally doesn’t pan out like that. In fact, you probably already have the benefit of hindsight and know what happens to me. I wish you could tell me . . . Or maybe I don’t . . . I don’t know anything. It’s like William Goldman said: ‘Nobody knows anything.’ So you already know more than all of showbiz and me. I hope that makes you feel good.

  Dom Joly

  January 2015

  Chapter 1

  Mr Gund

  Fame, when it came, was on a train. Coach no. 3. Standard class. Whilst travelling from London Paddington to Oxford. It’s all been pretty weird ever since.

  It was Tuesday, 18 January 2000. Four days after the first episode of Trigger Happy TV had aired on Channel 4 and I can’t remember why, but I was going to Oxford. I was seated to the rear of the carriage and reading a newspaper when that mobile phone ringtone went off. Without knowing I was on board, three random strangers all shouted, ‘HELLO, I’M ON THE TRAIN . . . NO, IT’S RUBBISH . . . CIAO!’ I sat there, dumbfounded. What the hell had just happened? Part of me wanted to stand up and shout, ‘It’s me. I’m that Big Mobile guy off the telly. That’s my catchphrase you’re all doing . . .’ But there was also a part of me that was frightened. I had suddenly stepped into a whole new world – a world whose rules I really didn’t understand and in which I was pretty sure that I didn’t belong.

  My first ever job in comedy was as a researcher on The Mark Thomas Comedy Product on Channel 4. I’d got that job after I was fired from being a producer for ITN in Parliament, for paying someone to kick a football into David Mellor’s face. You know David Mellor? Former member of the Cabinet, Queen’s Counsel, award-winning broadcaster? That’s how he introduces himself to black-cab drivers . . . But I digress. I’d organised for some friends to have a kick-about in the background as I interviewed Mellor on College Green. I might have mentioned that it would not be totally unhelpful were the interview to be interrupted in some way. One minute in, the ball came flying towards us and struck Mellor hard on the side of the face.

  Personally, I felt that this was just the sort of television that the UK public was crying out for. ITN obviously felt differently. So I sent my CV to a bunch of production companies in an attempt to move into documentaries. By chance one of these CVs landed on the desk of the production company making Mark Thomas’s first show, a kind of pre-Michael Moore political satire show in which Mark did some live stand-up interspersed with some anarchic, silly VTs.

  I was asked in for an interview and assumed it was for another political show. I put on my best (and only) suit and up I went to Ham Yard in Soho. I quickly surmised that this was no normal political show – far from it. This sort of show was going to suit me much more than the rather stifling, nerdy atmosphere of Westminster. They asked me what I would do if I were to play a joke on Westminster. I told them an idea I’d had about Cabinet reshuffles. They don’t do it now, but back then, whenever there was a Cabinet reshuffle, MPs would sit near a phone for a couple of days desperately hoping to get the call to come into Number 10. I’d found out that it was just the Number 10 switchboard that made the call and so it wouldn’t be difficult to fake. My idea was to ring as many Tory backbenchers as possible pretending to be Number 10 and to ask them all to pop over at 2pm. The result would be a confused and angry scrum of ambitious, chinless wonders all trying to get past the Plebgate police officers with no record of their supposed appointments. The interview went well and they told me that the next step was for me to meet Mark himself. As I was getting up to leave, Joanna, one of the heads of the company, took me aside. She seemed nervous about mentioning something: ‘Uuhhmm, Mark is a bit . . . judgemental. It might be better if you didn’t wear your suit when you come in to actually meet him.’

  She seemed worried that this request might somehow offend me. It was the best thing I’ve ever had said to me in television. I was in TV for two things: not to wear a suit and not to have to get up too early. I got home, threw off my suit and have never worn one seriously since. Overnight, w
ith minimum effort, I’d jumped from politics into comedy.

  There were two researchers on the first Mark Thomas Comedy Product – me and another Dom, Dom English. Dom E was the real deal, a proper telly-head. He was a smart Essex boy schooled in telly at the university of The Big Breakfast. He wrote sitcoms and knew exactly what he wanted to do. I could tell he thought I was a lazy, floppy-haired, posh chancer, which I was. We got on like a house on fire. We were supposed to do ‘research’ and help set up ideas for some of the VTs that Mark was going to film on the show. If I am honest, I was a rubbish researcher. In hindsight, I should have mentioned this at the job interview. Fortunately, Dom E was brilliant at it. I just mucked about and hoped nobody would notice. As the show didn’t have the biggest of budgets, I soon found myself volunteering to be in some of the VTs. This was easier than going to the trouble of hiring an extra who would come with restricted work hours, a stage-school attitude and annoying demands for endless coffee breaks. I did exciting things like having lunch with a foul man who was making legal snuff documentaries. I’d tried to conceal a hidden camera and a microphone in my trousers but the base unit got hotter and hotter until I had to run out of the restaurant screaming in pain with second-degree burns on my arse.

  One time, Dom E and I had to dress up as a penis and a fifty-pound note. The idea was that Mark was taking a confused group of Japanese tourists on a tour of locations of political scandals. The penis would indicate a sex scandal and the fifty-pound note meant it was financial. Guess who got the penis costume? My first appearance on television in a comedy capacity was dressed as a six-foot latex penis waving at Japanese tourists. Very little has changed since.

  Later we would take the same penis costume and try to persuade various Tory MPs like Jerry Hayes to put it on. Looking back, it seems so unnecessary – trying to get a monumental penis to dress up as a penis. At the time, however, it seemed cutting edge. Last I heard of the penis costume it was borrowed by Stewart Lee, who then used it on his BAFTA-winning TV show. I’m so glad that everything worked out for the penis – I always had a feeling that he would make it. Penises tend to do well in telly.

  I came up with a simple idea for the show that Mark was totally uninterested in. It was a schoolboy kicking his football into weird places and then asking for it back. I can’t remember why but Lawless, the production company, said that Dom E and I could go and film it. So we both dressed up in Just William-type schoolboy outfits and off we went. We kicked a football over the wall into Wormwood Scrubs, Kensington Palace, Buckingham Palace and, finally, Number 10 Downing Street. Each time, we would either ring the buzzer or speak to the security people in very high-pitched voices and ask for the ball back. Wormwood Scrubs told us to sling our hook. No one replied at Kensington Palace and the police at Buckingham Palace looked mystified but did retrieve the ball for us. Downing Street was a different kettle of fish, however . . . I booted the ball over the wall into the garden but, before we could approach to ask for it back, we were challenged by an armed guard. He was not a man to mess with. He approached us with gun raised and told us that we were lucky that we hadn’t been shot – we could have been the IRA throwing a bomb into the garden . . . Still in my high-pitched voice I queried this tactic as being very improbable and quite ineffective in the retrieval of Ireland for the Irish. We never got the ball back but nobody shot us, so overall it was a good day.

  I’d have worked on the show for free. In fact, had I had any money I would have happily paid to take part. I’d had my first taste of something I could possibly be good at. It was about time. I was fast approaching my thirtieth birthday. I’d been a journalist, a diplomat, a waiter, a barman, a bookseller and something in the City that I never really understood. It appeared that I’d finally found something that I could do with my life. Now I just had to work out how to keep on doing it.

  Help came in the form of the director of The Mark Thomas Comedy Product, Andy De Emmony. He, Dom English and I made a little pilot show called Dog Bites, in which we filmed four of us driving around in a VW camper van doing stunts like dressing up as a hungover penguin and trying to break back into London Zoo after a night out on the town. It wasn’t great, but it was different and it briefly got the interest of Jon Plowman at the BBC before, like most things in telly, it disappeared. This was not to be the last I heard of Jon Plowman.

  I’d started experimenting with animating prank phone calls. It allowed you instant access to anywhere in the world with a phone – ideal for the lazy prankster. I would listen to my favourite prank-call protagonists, The Jerky Boys, for hours on end. My favourite call on the Dog Bites reel was one I made to a TGI Friday’s restaurant in which I tried to organise a wake for a recently departed patron of their establishment.

  Me: ‘He really loved your restaurant, the happy smiles, the fun that the waiting staff imbue . . . If, however, we had the wake there, would it be possible for the staff to wear black armbands and not smile at all for the whole evening, as it would be disrespectful?’

  Manager: ‘Uuhhmm, I’d have to check with head office.’

  Me: ‘I was thinking we could have an unhappy hour instead of happy hour.’

  Manager: ‘I’m not sure we could . . .’

  Me: ‘And you know when it’s someone’s birthday all the staff come to the table with a cake and sing happy birthday? Would it be possible for them to sing “My Death” by Jacques Brel . . .? Obviously, without a cake . . .’

  I loved phone calls.

  But with Dog Bites not going anywhere, I was unemployed. Dom E got another job immediately. I didn’t, and was starting to panic when I saw an ad in the Guardian. It read:

  Do you have a sense of humour? New comedy channel looking to employ energetic, bright people.

  I wasn’t entirely sure about ‘energetic’ but it was the first ad in a newspaper I’d ever seen that was of any interest, so I applied.

  I got the job. It was only much later that I was told that somebody had recommended an amazing researcher on The Mark Thomas Comedy Product called Dom to Myfanwy Moore, my unnervingly young boss at the channel. I think it had never occurred to her that there might have been two Doms on the show, the good one and me. So I got in – thanks, Dom E, I owe you.

  The Paramount Comedy Channel was the right place at the right time. In the next year or so they had Sacha Baron Cohen, Matt Lucas, David Walliams, The Mighty Boosh, Leigh Francis, Armstrong and Miller, Simon Pegg and me all doing stuff there. It was a playground for people to try weird material out on the telly. It was heaven.

  I was hired to be an assistant producer on a weekly show called Man Made News (a great title thought up by Leigh Francis, who worked in the art department at the time). The presenter of the show was a Scot called Dominik Diamond, who presented a show about video games called GamesMaster on Channel 4. Diamond was, to put it mildly, an arse. He was rude, unpleasant, self-obsessed and remarkably untalented. He was perfect for telly.

  Diamond had previously hosted a show on the channel called Dom ‘n’ Kirk’s Night O’Plenty, in which future Little Britain stars Matt Lucas and David Walliams appeared as guests in an early incarnation of theirs, called Mash and Peas. It quickly became clear that they thought the same of Diamond as everybody else. They proceeded to muck about and utterly destroy him until he finally lost his temper and called them ‘complete arseholes’ live on air. It was top, unintentional telly and the recording was passed around Paramount like a samizdat whenever Diamond was not rampaging around the office like some ludicrous fame monster.

  The series producer was a woman called Alex Jackson-Long and we soon bonded in our loathing for Diamond. Despite this we had a show to make and we didn’t want to disappoint the six thousand viewers that the show regularly attracted. This was the big time. One of the joys of having a selective audience (in the immortal words of Ian Faith, Spinal Tap’s manager) was that nobody really cared what you got up to, so you could experiment to your heart’s content. I came up with a character called Hey Hippo �
�� essentially a purple hippo glove puppet that I turned into a budget Dennis Pennis (who was my big hero). Armed with the puppet and a cameraman called Stuart, I would scour a fax-sheet called London at Large that listed which celebs would be doing what that week in terms of signings and appearances. We would then go along, stand in a queue and wait for our turn for an interview.

  The basic joke was that I would say hello to the celeb, show him the puppet as though embarrassed by my job and explain that Hey Hippo was a hugely popular children’s character and would they mind just saying hello to him on screen? I would then adopt a weird Fozzie Bear-type voice and start the interview. It would normally go like this.

  Hey Hippo: ‘Hey kids, I’m here with Bill Wowman who used to play in a big band about, like a hundred years ago. Hey Bill, say hello to the kids.’

  Bill Wyman: (awkwardly) ‘Hello kids.’

  Hey Hippo: ‘So, Bill, are you a big fan of mine?’

  Bill Wyman: ‘Uuhhmm . . . yes, sure I’m a huge fan.’

  Hey Hippo: ‘Really!! You’re a big fan, do you watch my show all the time?’

  Bill Wyman: ‘Uuhhmm, yeah, I never miss your show.’

  Hey Hippo: ‘Oh yeah! What channel is it on, Bill?’

  There then followed a long awkward silence as Bill, or whomever I was talking to, would look around for their PR person to come and save them, the PR person that they paid specifically to keep people like me away. It never failed and I harassed an eclectic bunch of people from Billy Idol to Sir Steve Redgrave. Rod Stewart was my all-time favourite – he was just really lovely and unfazed by anything.

  I discovered that Barry Manilow was booked to open the Harrods Sale. The plan was that he would get into a horse-drawn carriage at the Harrods Stables in a little square behind the store. Manilow would then be horse-drawn to meet ‘fugging’ Mohamed Al-Fayed and his adoring public. Stuart and I got to the square early and awaited our prey. About half an hour later another camera crew turned up. It was Dennis Pennis. There was now a little queue of people waiting to take the piss out of Barry Manilow. I’d met Paul Kaye, the man behind Dennis Pennis, when he’d used my roof to film a Pennis sequence in which he kicked a football over London. That was probably the exact moment that I realised what I wanted to do with my life.