Chatty man

An audience with Alan Carr

Being funny comes easy, he says. It was a skill he developed early as ‘‘the minciest kid in the school’’, to stop him getting beaten up. He’s also camp as Christmas, which gets an easy laugh out of straight audiences every time, though it tends to aggravate the more politicised members of his gay audience. But the main thing that makes Manchester comedian Alan Carr such a wildly successful chat show host is empathy. Carr clearly likes people. Whether he’s talking to a vacuous media construct such as Kim Kardashian,, or a pompous old grouch like John Cleese, his approach is the same: fire some liquor into them, put them at their ease, and then celebrate the fact that these strange creatures have taken it upon themselves to make the world a more colourful and interesting place for the rest of us.

Coy and mischievous one minute, slightly waspish the next, he teases them gently, slaps them on the knee, disarms them with a very unforced sort of warmth.

On a heroically garish set with a whiff of 1980s nightclub about it, Carr talks to Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, Britney and One Direction as if that overstuffed gold sofa was in his own front room. And he’s a surprisingly good listener.

‘‘Oh, yes! I worked five years in a call centre, so I can bloody listen, love! If I can sit there from nine til five listening to someone talk about how their credit card’s been declined, then I can listen to anything!’’

And I could listen to Carr all day, despite a Northern accent so raw, nasal and high-pitched, it sets your ears ringing.

He’s thoughtful and hilarious, and winningly rude. At one point, he suggests I might like to imagine him in the nude while pleasuring myself. This is not a proposition an interviewee has ever made to me before.

Carr’s on his way down here for a short stand up tour entitled Yap

Yap Yap, the follow-up to previous hit shows, Tooth Fairy and Spexy Beast. But stand up’s more of a sideline these days, something he does to test-drive new material, keep his timing sharp and beef up his bank balance. He’s best known for his Chatty Man talk show – now up to its 16th series – which screens at 9.30pm Thursdays on TV One. ‘‘I’m not saying I’m Parkinson or anything, but I am genuinely interested in what my guests have to say. I do my research and listen to them closely and try to get something interesting out of them. On a lot of chat shows, the host just wants to shoe-horn their own pre-written jokes in there every few minutes, but I’d rather sit and listen and see where it goes.’’

It is one of the better jobs he’s had, though this is not saying much.

‘‘I did a drama studies degree, which is the best possible way to end up in McDonald’s saying, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ I discovered I couldn’t really act, so I worked in call centres, a supermarket, a factory. I wiped grease off car parts with meths. I packed shampoo...’’

His worst ever job involved cleaning up a place where they made CDs.

‘‘It was my job to sweep up the tiny bits of crushed-up plastic from under all the machinery. Someone had to hold onto my legs and swing me underneath these huge cogs with a broom in my hand to get it all out! So when people say to me, ‘Alan, why are you always so happy?’, I tell them that any job is better than spending a whole summer being swung by your ankles under a machine. It was ‘orrible, like something from Dickens! I was basically Oliver f...ing Twist!’’

What kept him going though all this, unsurprisingly, was his robust sense of humour. No matter what the situation, he found the funny side.

‘‘Really, humanity provides an endless array of funny stories. You probably have those documentaries over there, like, The Man with the 12 Stone Testicle, or I’m Too Fat To Love. I love things like that, not because I’m laughing AT these unfortunate people, but because you get a lot of insight into human nature from them.’’

Sometimes he’ll be at his desk, writing jokes, staring down at a blank piece of paper, and if nothing’s happening, he’ll go out and find a crowd.

‘‘I’ll go and have a cup of tea in a caff somewhere and just watch people for a while, and little nuggets of jokes will come out of that. And those jokes often set off light-bulb moments in the audience later on, where they think, ‘Oh, gawd, yes – I’ve done that, too!’’’ Carr has no interest in jokes that make people feel worse about themselves, or more anxious about the state of the world. His job is to offer an escape from all that, albeit temporarily.

‘‘No governments are gonna topple with my material. It’s anecdotal, conversational, autobiographical. If you’ve had a rough week, you can come along, have a laugh and feel better.

‘‘I won’t start mentioning Syria or Iraq, or making jokes about rape or paedophiles.

‘‘Some comedians like to appear a bit edgy with that sort of stuff, but I am not one of them.

‘‘I just want to come down to New Zealand and have a right laugh.’’

On Chatty Man, many of the laughs he generates seem to be lubricated out of people by booze. Carr sits down with three guests each night, opens up his little

liquor cabinet and offers them the kinds of drinks they would never normally touch.

Can I get you a snakebite, darling? A Babycham and orange? Would you like some of this lavender-infused mead, or some

brandy and blackberry nip? Some of his guests end up getting a bit wrecked.

‘‘Oh, yes! But can you imagine the hangovers I have meself after the show? I sometimes I go for a wee afterwards and I’ve had so many strangely coloured drinks, my knob’s like a lightsabre! I look down and there’s all these reds and the yellows and purples coming out…’’

I’d rather not picture that, Alan, to be honest. It’s night-time over here and I’ve only just had my dinner.

‘‘Oh, come on, you love it! You don’t fool me. You are excited by this conversation. You can imagine yourself tucking into my party sausage, I can tell. But that

‘I did a drama studies degree, which is the best possible way to end up in McDonald’s saying, ‘Do you want fries with that?’’ Alan Carr