Shame and sadness do not go away overnight. Comedy saved me...
Comedian and TV presenter, Tom Allen talks to HANNAH STEPHENSON about his struggles before coming out and being a joker to survive
FLAMBOYANT and eccentric, Tom Allen has made a career out of his unique style of sharp, acerbic wit, hosting shows including The Apprentice: You’re Fired and The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice with Jo Brand, and enjoying sell-out stand-up tours.
“I like to celebrate the peculiar and I like to celebrate the eccentric,” he declares, traits which are often explored in his stand-up comedy, enhanced by his quirky dress sense.
Tom, 37, speaks with a cut-glass accent but freely admits he has no idea where that came from, being the son of a coach driver in a working class family in Bromley, Kent, and having gone to an unremarkable comprehensive.
Once the youngest member of the Noel Coward Society, being an outsider has drawn him to comedy, though.
“I have found with stand-up that the more I lean into the times I felt embarrassed or awkward or an oddball, the more I have found that audiences respond to it,” he says. “Fundamentally, we all feel like outsiders and feel sad at times and we all feel an existential sense of who we are.”
While humour is never far from his lips, for much of his life he was plagued with shame, predominantly about being gay, which for years he tried to hide behind the eccentric behaviour which has become the calling card of his comedy, the Victorian clothing he favours and his pedantic tidiness (particularly at parties).
“I feared that people would make fun of me if I used a big word or if I held my hands in a certain way or I did button up my blazer. If I was clearing up at a party I wasn’t able to do it with a great sense of joy.
“Now, I would be like, ‘This is the party, I’ve just tidied up! Let’s have a canape workshop!’ Now I can celebrate this eccentricity.”
For many years, shame and self-loathing engulfed him, he admits in his autobiography, No Shame, as he endeavoured to stay under the radar of the school bullies who tormented him, tried to navigate online dating and finally came out to his parents when he was in his 20s.
He didn’t help himself, though. As a teenager he’d wear suits and waistcoats, and even carried a briefcase and a long umbrella to school, which he used as a walking cane. Sometimes he wore a bow tie. It was all a magnet for the bullies. The book is in turns extremely funny and achingly sad, as Tom charts a catalogue of self-loathing and unhappiness which he endured for quite a long time, before finding his feet – firstly in the National Youth Theatre, then pursuing stand-up at the age of 22, going on to win
So You Think You’re Funny in Edinburgh and the BBC New Comedy Award in the same year.
He explains: “My journey in the book is that comedy is about taking those feelings of unhappiness and rather than burying them, putting them on a stage.
“I hope the book reaches out to people so they feel less alone.”
Tom knew he was gay aged nine, he writes, but kept it quiet because he just wanted to fit in.
He didn’t come out to his parents until he was in his 20s, although his mother said she had known all along, while his father was a little disappointed that he’d lived with the secret for so long.
“My dad was born during the Second World War at a time when it was illegal to be gay. I had assumed he wouldn’t understand but there’s nothing modern about compassion and I’m very lucky that my parents are very loving people,” Tom says now.
“While we wouldn’t talk about sexuality around the dinner table, it didn’t mean they weren’t totally compassionate. I assumed my dad might not approve and I was wrong.”
Why did it take him so long to come out? He was, after all, a teenager of the late 90s, when the issue wasn’t such a massive deal.
“Changes in the law and role modelling around that time were very positive but these things aren’t a switch. Those ingrained senses of shame and sadness that come as a result of you feeling not quite right don’t go away overnight.”
Tom jokes about the fact that he still lives with his parents in the same 1960s end-of-terrace family home in Kent where he grew up, as his dad says, ‘near the nice houses’.
“I’m only 37, I don’t know why people have got a problem with it,” he exclaims. “My family have been a great support to me throughout my stand-up career. When I’m on tour I’m not in any place for very long, so it’s nice to hang around with them a bit.”
His mental age seems to have gone into reverse, he observes.
“When I was a child I was 46 years old but now I’m an adult, I’m like, ‘No! I’m barely 11!’
“I’ve done a lot of reading about what I want to be as an adult, which was a good learning process,” he teases.
His comedy peers include the likes of Josh Widdicombe, James Acaster and Sarah Millican.
“I took a long time to reach out to be friends with people,” he confesses. “I just thought everybody else knew exactly what they were doing with comedy and life.”
It was only when he was invited to share a flat during the Edinburgh Festival with other performers that he realised they were all in the same boat.
“That was a lovely feeling hanging out with lots of people who were the same age as me, going through the same thing. Josh (Widdicombe) and James Acaster were there, Nish Kumar and Amy Annette.”
Was he the most eccentric of the group?
“Well, as you can imagine, I was definitely the most tidy,” he deadpans. “No-one wanted to take the bins out because we were on the top floor in this flat.
“There were bin bags piling up, it was like the 70s, the winter of discontent, in our flat. It was everything I hated, when I’ve spent so much of my life polishing the hob.”
He sought therapy in his early 20s when still trying to come to terms with his sexuality, which helped, but comedy has been his salvation. “Comedy definitely saved me. Some people tell jokes to make people laugh, some people tell jokes to survive. For me, the best comedy is the stuff about communication, where you go, ‘Do you feel like this? Have you noticed this?’
“It’s also about feeling exuberant and outgoing in a way that the world has a habit of slapping us around the face going, ‘No! Don’t you be so big and so bold! You get in your box!’. “Comedy allows us to laugh in a way to make what is a frightening world sometimes seem a bit more bearable.”
Tom is still single and ‘ready to mingle’ but has had enough of online dating for the time being. “I have a theory that people from Grindr should get on to people doing the track and trace systems because it’s all about finding people in your local area, isn’t it?” “I sometimes think I would like to find a life partner, but then do I think that because that’s what I’m told I want?” he continues. “Maybe I’m quite happy as I am. I have had (romantic) experiences – I find I don’t know what I’m doing and then end up getting all upset about it. My job is to be the funnyman. And I cherish that more.”