Why I won’t make jokes about Brexit
Marcus Brigstocke tells Rosa Silverman about his troubled teenage years, divorce and how he has managed to find happiness
How do you solve a problem like Brexit? It may be keeping politicians awake at night, but spare a thought for the country’s stand-up comedians. Marcus Brigstocke, a veteran of the comedy circuit, learnt the hard way just how tricky it can be to handle this scalding hot potato of a subject. In 2017, he described how a handful of audience members attending his shows outside London had walked out in anger at his anti-brexit material.
When I raise this today over coffee in a trendy café near his south London home, he sighs. But, clearly, it has left an impression.
“They have come to laugh, so I have a job, it’s my responsibility to get that right, and I didn’t get it right,” he says. “The job was too hard, the joke wasn’t good enough. I was too angry.”
He didn’t just change his material in response: “It’s caused me to change my whole persona.”
On his last stand-up tour, the 45-year-old father-of-two, who is also an actor, went into character as Lucifer from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, “looking at shifting morality and how those who disagree with us we now decide are wicked. That was about me and my inability to deal with people – Corbynites, Brexiteers – who I disagree with.”
This is typical of the Brigstocke I encounter: relentlessly political and eager to make sense of the world, rather than just send it up. It’s this kind of cerebral combination that makes him such a staple on BBC Radio 4. (Credits include The Now Show, I’ve Never Seen Star Wars and
The Brig Society.) He is also painfully self-critical, self-aware and contrite – not just about offending Brexiteers, but in his personal life, too.
In 2013, Brigstocke’s marriage of 12 years to Sophie Prideaux, the mother of his 16-year-old son Alfie and 13-yearold daughter Emily, ended after he had an affair with his Spamalot co-star Hayley Tamaddon, a former Coronation Street actress.
“It was my fault, what happened,” he says, adding that he would never incorporate it into any of his comedy routines, as he is fiercely protective of his ex-wife’s privacy. “But the broader topic of my failings as a man? Fine.”
In fact, he is beginning a new chapter: on Christmas Day Brigstocke proposed to his comedian girlfriend Rachel Parris, who is part of the “Austentatious” group, which performs improvised interpretations of made-up Jane Austen titles like Strictly Come Darcy.
She is, I should add, extremely funny. I ask how he proposed, hoping there were jokes involved – or at least full Regency costume.
“Old-school, one knee. Lovely,” he says. The wedding will take place this September.
In the meantime, Brigstocke has been busy fighting crime as part of a new Channel 4 programme, Famous and Fighting Crime, which will see him and four other well-known faces (Penny Lancaster, Katie Piper, Made in Chelsea’s Jamie Laing and Gogglebox’s Sandi Bogle) join officers at Cambridge Constabulary and respond to 999 calls. If the title sounds gimmicky, the content is gripping. In the first of four episodes, a clearly shaken Lancaster is threatened with a dirty needle. It’s hard-hitting stuff which, presented through the eyes of the ingénue celebrities, sheds light on the job of the police. Although his own brushes with the law have been limited (“I’ve been pulled over for speeding”), his battle with addiction in his teens made it all the more affecting when he came face-to-face with those in the grip of dependency during filming. “It was very emotional for me,” he admits. “One of the things I use to stay sober is gratitude, and my gratitude for how charmed my life is has been amplified by making this programme.” Brigstocke started drinking around the age of 12, at boarding school in Somerset. He started taking drugs at 13 – sniffing glue, and doing LSD and weed. But when he went into rehab aged 17, it was because of an eating disorder that had seen him balloon to 24 stone. “When I got in there and started saying how much I’d been drinking and the drugs I’d been taking, they went, ‘Yeah, that’s not OK’.”
He got clean and turned things around, and hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol since. “I’ve never had a legal drink in my life,” he says.
It must have been tough for his mother, a head teacher, and father, who worked in the City. “Things were very difficult with my parents at the time,” he says. “I was very dysfunctional … but it was them that saved me. I wasn’t easy to put into rehab and it must have been very painful and scary for them. Like most families of addicts, they didn’t know what to do for the best. They were amazing and have supported me through all the ups and downs of recovery.”
After failing to get into drama
‘I was very dysfunctional but my parents saved me. I wasn’t easy to put into rehab’
school he took up a place at Bristol University, but his best friend told him “you’re funny, you should do comedy”. That same friend entered him into a stand-up competition, in which he came second – and he hasn’t looked back since. “I came offstage and was like, ‘this is it, this is all I want to do’.”
Yet, Brigstocke is the first to point out the extent to which his background has helped. “[Comedy] requires you to work for free for a long time,” he says. “Well, you can work for free if you’ve got money. I did. There’s massive advantages [for] nice, posh people.”
He frequently uses the words “lucky” and “charmed” to describe his lot in life. “I’m an addict in recovery and have been for a long time, but I’m a nice posh boy, it’s been easy for me, relatively. I’ve had to work really hard, but when I fell there was a safety net there, and that isn’t true for enough people. The police pick up the pieces.”
At the start of the Channel 4 series, Brigstocke says: “The view of the police in London is, broadly speaking, that they’re racist and not all that clever. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know.”
What does he think now? “That they are racist and thick!” he jokes. “No,” he adds, seriously, “It’s much more complicated. My perception of them now is their job is way more difficult than most people realise.”
Perhaps one day this too will be turned into fodder for his comedy. After all, his mantra is that no topic should be out of bounds. “There is no subject I wouldn’t make a joke about,” he says. “But it has to be a good enough joke.”
Even, say, about the Holocaust? “Yes, absolutely I would if I could think of the right joke. As it stands, I’ve never done a Holocaust joke because you need a joke so funny you need to get beyond what happened. You can’t trivialise their experience so you’ve got to come up with something so incredibly funny,” he says.
He has also steered clear of the transgender rights discussion, which he says has become “alarmingly toxic… I have to say I’ve kept very consciously silent on the subject.”
This is partly in fear of backlash, and partly because as a “straight, white male… there are questions about whether I’m helping or not.”
I wonder what his children think. Do they watch his comedy? “Yes, it’s really fun now they can come to all my stuff. They’re exceptionally funny kids.
“My son said, ‘it’s all right, Dad, people still know who you are from your Experian advert.’ I was like, ‘listen, mate, that advert is paying for everything we have right now’.”
It’s not clear to what extent he’s joking. But it sounds like he’s in a good place. Happy, even. “You know what? Yes,” he says. “Truly, truly happy.” Famous and Fighting Crime starts on Monday at 9pm on Channel 4