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Forget James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt – there’s a new spy in town. And he’s not dressed in a neat tuxedo or head-to-toe camouflage. He’s wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt.
That’s right, Milton Jones – Mock the Week’s resident oddball, Radio 4 regular and king of the surreal one-liner – is back on tour, and this time he’s an international man of mystery.
The wild-haired joke-teller might not be the obvious choice for a secret agent, but in Milton: Impossible the 55-year-old comic will be taking his audience through an action-packed story via hundreds of his trademark, exquisitely-crafted pieces of wordplay.
We caught up with the Live at the Apollo star ahead of his UK tour to check he’s had the proper training.
The new tour is called ‘Milton: Impossible’. What made you decide on the spy theme?
Basically, I came up with the title before the show I thought: “That sounds good!” So I made a rod for my own back by theming it. But sometimes it’s easier to write to a theme than have a completely blank page. The show is based on Mission: Impossible, but Mission: Impossible has a huge budget and lots of special effects. My show is just me and some hats and about 250 jokes. It’s low-tech instead of hi-tech.
So, like your last two tours – Milton Jones is Out There and The Temple of Daft – this show has a narrative element to it?
If you’re going to do a show for over an hour you can’t just tell bits. That’s what I do on Mock the Week and Live at the Apollo, which is fine, but you want something with the veneer of satisfaction, otherwise it’s too fragmented. This show’s got an interrogation scene, a car chase with a swivel chair, and I end up escaping on top of a Vince Cable Car. It’s not strictly realistic, but it’s as daft as ever.
Before touring, you perform work-in-progress shows to test your material. How important are those previews?
They’re very important.
Even after all these years, I’ll think I’ve written the best joke ever and it turns out to be one of the worst jokes ever
– but what I’ve improvised off the back of it stays in the show. So I would have never got to point B without going through the dreadful point A.
Do you end up with a lot of great jokes that just don’t fit into the theme or narrative of the show?
Yeah, I do. There are about 250 jokes in the show, but I reckon I end up writing about 350. A lot of them are then used somewhere else – in the next tour, on radio, on Mock the Week – so they’re never wasted. And if they’re particularly brilliant then I might go out of my way to include them in the show.
Have you ever thought of doing a show of just the off cut jokes that didn’t make it into the final version?
‘Yes, I could even call it “off cuts”, couldn’t I? In fact, some would argue that that’s what I do anyway.
When do you consider a joke ‘finished’?
‘When I’ve got an idea over in the minimum number of words, then I know it’s done.’
And what makes the perfect joke?
If a gag works, it makes a cartoon in someone’s head – a very brief picture where they think they know where it’s going, and then you pull the carpet from under them and it was all about something else all along. It’s reverse engineering from an idea or a phrase.
Your last tour played to more than 100,000 people, and you’ve appeared on Mock the Week more than 40 times. What’s more fun to do: a live show or a TV appearance?
They’re both good in different ways. Going to small place on a Saturday night where they’re all determined to have a great laugh – I don’t think that can be beaten, in one sense. With radio or television, you’re as good as the edit, and it’s out of your control. That may well work in your favour, or it may not.