The kids like to run around my giant head
Comedian Ross Noble talks about improvisation, his ‘Total Recall’ stage set and why his wife is rarely at his shows
WHAT can we expect from your tour?
I’ve always been a fan of breaking away from the thing of a comedian just standing in front of a blank stage with a couple of lights, a stool, and a table with some water on it. Now, if you can’t go two hours without a drink of water, there’s something wrong with you. If you go and see Phantom of the Opera, he’s not on stage constantly swigging water, is he?
So I don’t do that. I like to create massive sets. I’ve always loved the idea of this big, theatrical, rock and roll set and then just this bloke walking on and talking.
So on the stage I’ve got a massive head, which is my head, with veins which are LED lights. It’s like a giant cyborg ‘Total Recall’ version of my head, and I walk out through the two halves of my head. It’s totally unnecessary but it makes me laugh a lot. And then it’s whatever pops into my head after that.
I read that your shows are about 70 per cent improvised. Is that right?
I don’t know, I’ve never measured it! What I do is I go on stage at the beginning and improvise, then if something tickles me I might write it down and then the next night, I’ll go back to that idea. But I might do it a bit differently.
So it’s never quite the same. I like that white-hot heat of being in the moment. So even if an idea was good, I won’t repeat it exactly the same because that’s last night’s thing, I’ll just take the essence of it and do something new with it.
I get distracted quite easily. Whatever’s in my head tends to dance to the front. When my show’s at its best I think it’s when my brain is open to anything.
Do you get nervous before going on stage?
No, because there’s nothing to be frightened of. I think this applies to life as well. There’s no point worrying about what’s going to happen, you may as well just deal with it when it happens. I think you can get too hamstrung by worrying. Don’t worry about the past, don’t worry about the future, just enjoy the moment you’re in.
Could you just write in the article, ‘At this point, Ross got into a Lotus position and floated in the air…’?
I do think I’m best on stage when I’m playing. And some people might think this is an emotionally stunted, man-child way of looking at it but I think it’s nice to make everything about playing. Because if you do that, it doesn’t matter if you’re winning or losing, you’re just playing.
For example, if I say to my kids, ‘Tidy your room’, they won’t. If you go, ‘Let’s see how many socks we can throw across the room into that laundry basket’, you get the tidying done and everyone’s had fun.
I think that might be the secret of happiness – just turn everything into a game.
Has fatherhood changed your comedy?
It’s made me tired! In a sense, it has changed my comedy. I used to spend a lot more time daydreaming. I think having children focused me a little bit. I used to spend a lot of time in my own head but I check in with the real world a little bit more now, which you have to, because you don’t want your kids to die and all that.
My stuff used to be so divorced from reality, people used to call it ‘surreal’. Whereas now I think it’s magic realism. It still takes that trip off to wherever, but it feels more grounded in reality, which possibly makes it more accessible.
You’ve been doing this since you were 15, which is nearly 30 years. How has comedy, or your comedy, changed in that time?
When I first started, it was the early 1990s and there were only four purpose-built comedy clubs back then. There were a lot of performance poets around and people would say, ‘Are you an alternative comedian?’. This idea of ‘alternative’ comedy was people like Ben Elton and French & Saunders who weren’t sexist or homophobic, like the 1970s comedians.
If you look at Jack Dee and Frank Skinner, they were the first wave of what you’d deem ‘alternative’ comics who hosted programmes on mainstream, popular, primetime telly. Then there was another wave of Peter Kay, Jason Manford, John Bishop: a whole swathe of northern comedians who suddenly became big mainstream stars who, along with Michael McIntyre, were hosting all of the big gameshows and chat shows and stand-up shows on the telly.
Or take Vic and Bob. They were as ‘alternative’ as you could get, but then with Shooting Stars they became incredibly popular and mainstream. Acts like Little Britain or Harry Hill would never have appealed to a Saturday night audience ten years previously.
What I’m saying is there are no lines drawn with comedy anymore. It can be quirky, and different, and still be on primetime telly.
I’ve just ploughed my own furrow and done my own thing and that’s allowed me to do bits and bobs of interesting things, without having to become a gameshow host.
What are your fans like?
They tend to be people with an imagination, because it’s that kind of show. What’s mad about my crowd is that I’ve built my audience mainly live. I went from pubs to bigger venues and it grew like that. Then I had some DVDs and it grew some more, and now with the internet I’ve got really young people who’ve found me online, and because I do Radio 4 stuff there’s older people, and then there’s Have I Got News For You fans, so there’s a real mix. There are people who were teenagers when they first started coming to see me and now they’re in their 40s.
You’ll have a kid with a face-full of piercings sitting next to someone in a tweed jacket and I love that. Imagination isn’t limited by age or class or anything.
Does your wife come to your shows?
She only comes to see me once a year. You do see some of the comedy WAGS and HABS going along to every gig but my wife can’t be arsed with that. She lives with me, she gets it all the time! She’ll sometimes bring the kids to a theatre near home for the sound check if it’s a new set to let them run around my giant head because they like that.
How do you find the actual travelling part of touring?
It’s boring and depressing if you just do your show, sit in the bar, then go to bed so I try and keep it fun. I’ve got a little crew of guys I’ve known for ages and we find stuff to do during the day.
It depends where we are. When we were in Australia it was like a slightly more blokey version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
We’ll do stuff like find motocross tracks or forests to go off and have fun with some off-road biking. It’s exhausting but you’re full of adrenalin when you go on stage after a day doing that. Sometimes I’ll look down at my hands on stage and my fingers will be bleeding.
Or I’ll go rock-climbing or bouldering or sea swimming or something. Near one of the Australian shows there was a Ninja Warrior training compound and we went there.
Escape Rooms is always a popular one. You have to give it plenty of time though: you don’t want to be in an Escape Room an hour before you’re due on stage. We did one in Brisbane and we couldn’t find the entrance. You know it’s not a good start if you can’t even find the entrance to the Escape Room.
Do you get heckled?
Sometimes people shout stuff out and it’s funny, and I don’t try to knock them down. I’ll go, ‘Brilliant - good on you, that was funny’. But sometimes people don’t know the difference between heckling and interaction.
I encourage interaction. I’ll ask questions and open it up. But if I’m clearly on a roll and halfway through a sentence and someone shouts at you, you do think, ‘How can you think that’s alright?’.
There are comics around who have got mileage out of being cruel to people in the audience. Singling someone out and making that person feel like everyone in the room is laughing at them. I hate that. That’s not my thing at all.
●●Ross Noble is at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on May 16, and Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, on May 20.