Heard the one about the Brexiteer comedian?
Geoff Norcott is a lone, Leave-voting voice on the circuit, but people have got him all wrong, he tells Guy Kelly
Ihave to begin with a confession for Geoff Norcott: I had an avocado flatbread for lunch on the way to our interview and, as he can see, I’m wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. According to the comedian’s new BBC documentary, How the Middle Class Ruined Britain, in which he specifically rails against both those things, that makes me awful.
“Oh, mate… well, look,” he says, gesturing at the remnants of a hot salmon and beetroot wrap and a discarded green juice.
“It was the only option. I got halfway through the juice before I had to stop and buy a can of Diet Coke, because I can’t live a lie...”
Two months ago, Norcott – a rare breed on the comedy circuit in that he’s a Leave-voting, card-carrying Conservative, and very happy to talk about it – was all over the front pages when, in that official capacity, he was invited on to the BBC’S “diversity and inclusion” advisory group. Overseen by two of the corporation’s nonexecutive directors, Tom Ilube and Dame Tanni Grey-thompson, the panel is in place to drive the corporation towards fairer representation on and off screen.
At the time, Norcott says, most people grabbed the wrong end of the stick, assuming he had been chosen to represent white, middle-aged (he is 42) Brexiteer men – or, as some might have it, to hit the “gammon quota”. In fact, he was chosen to stand up for working-class voices. Still, a storm brewed, one Right-wing columnist predicted he’d be “replaced by a black transgender Eskimo” within 24 hours, and Norcott’s despair was largely ignored.
“At 6am, Twitter had already gone mad, The Guardian said, ‘Oh, he’s there because he’s white and male and looks like he shouts things out of a van’, missing the point entirely, but it showed that class isn’t the thing on the tip of most people’s tongues,” Norcott says, speaking after an appearance on Daily Politics. “Really, it’s driving a lot of the debate we have.”
The panel was never a permanent job (instead, it’s four sessions over 18 months), but the reaction served as a helpful reminder of why Norcott wanted to make a documentary about class for the BBC. It’ll be shown tomorrow, and takes aim squarely at what he perceives is an often hypocritical liberal, middle-class elite.
In his sights are wealthy parents who give their children a state education supposedly out of principle, but really game the system by providing alternative addresses in order to qualify for better-performing schools; then he meets middle-class campaigners against gentrification; and then people who, despite shouting loudest about social mobility, exclusively look to date people of the same background. It may make for awkward viewing – not least in the upper echelons of the BBC itself.
“To be honest, I’ll believe that it’s gone out when it goes out. I still feel like someone somewhere is going to
just go, ‘Um, this is about us …’ But they were actually good. There was an appetite for it.”
Fiddling the state school system was something Norcott knew went on, but hadn’t appreciated the scale of it until he rode along with council workers investigating suspected offenders. Some families were found to have clubbed together with other parents and share an empty flat in an attractive catchment area.
“I know people in the entertainment industry who virtue-signal as compassionate and Left-wing, but have done the same thing,” he says, not naming names. “And I’m the Tory. I’m supposed to be the evil, selfish one.”
Norcott, who lives in Cambridgeshire with his wife of 15 years, has one child – three-year-old Sebastian. “I know, I know,” he says of the name, “I wanted one that worked on two levels: Sebastian for the mortgage application, Seb for the stag-do. Like mine. Geoff sounds like a Scouse builder, whereas Geoffrey …” Sounds like the Attorney General? “Exactly. It’s useful to straddle the line.”
Norcott would never send Sebastian to private school. “It’s a bone of contention in my family, but if I did that, I’d be saying the experience I had going to state school – which taught me so much and I’d never change – I wouldn’t want for my kid. Besides, I want to be able to get on with him.” Norcott is good company: more cheerful than a lot of off-duty comics, and while he’s passionate about politics, he’s also flexible and willing to listen. He takes as many shots at the Right as the Left.
Norcott grew up in south London, his father a draftsman at BT and his mother a housewife, though they divorced when he was young. He lived on a council estate and attended comprehensive schools in Wandsworth and Wimbledon, gaining straight As, before attending Goldsmiths, then a liberal arts college and becoming an English teacher before entering comedy full-time.
He has a lot of middle-class attributes now, Norcott concedes, but he still “identifies as working class, to borrow the language of the Left”. As a boy, he was “a political Billy Elliot … hiding The Daily Telegraph inside a copy of Razzle”. I ask if it was Margaret Thatcher’s pull-yourself-up-by-yourbootstraps brand of Conservatism that appealed. He says the mere mention of her still gives him goosebumps.
“I was crying my eyes out at the recent documentary about her. Obviously, there are contentious parts of her legacy, but as a working-class person, the idea that you’ve got agency and can make your life better, that was inspiring. The problem with the Left is the state will give you consistency, but they’ll keep you where you are,” he says.
Norcott has voted Conservative in the last three elections, having previously flirted with Labour and the Lib Dems. He’s one of the few with a vote for the next prime minister, but when we meet hasn’t yet reached a decision.
“Get me in the booth and I’ll sniff the air,” he says. “Hunt’s handled Boris well in the debates, but he does look slightly like he’s only just arrived in his own body, doesn’t he? I think Boris will win, but not by a landslide.”
Does it bother him that Johnson – and Rees-mogg, and Farage, and many other leading Brexiteers – are, at best, privately educated, at worst cartoonishly posh? “No, I couldn’t give a s--- where somebody was educated. People care about ideas in this country. Boris isn’t my ideal choice, but he makes people feel something. The emotional side of politics is ridiculed, but it’s so much of it.” He has less time for Donald Trump, whose racist tweets he condemns and whom he won’t defend, “but I will defend his supporters.”
In his day job – which includes regular appearances on the BBC’S The Mash Report and Mock the Week, plus an autumn tour, Geoff Norcott: Taking Liberties doesn’t find many other comedians willing to admit they vote Tory. Some assume he’s putting his politics on in order to get bookings, but he doesn’t mind; besides, as his joke goes: “Voting Conservative is like buying a James Blunt album: you know for a fact that millions of other people must have done it, but weirdly you never meet them.”
Today, he’s has never been more in demand. Crowds are always a mixed bunch, from Brexiteer MPS and Right-wing journalists to liberals ready to laugh at themselves; plus, peculiarly, he’s noticed a surprising gay following.
“I don’t know why it is. When I started going on TV, my wife would ask if women send me naked photos, but it’s been zero. The main sexual advances I’ve had online have been from gay men,” he says. “I get loads of lesbian couples watching, too. I’m unafraid to be stereotypical about women, maybe that resonates with them.”
It’s interesting, Norcott reckons. Some people assume he’ll be homophobic, then he tells them, truthfully, that his son’s godparents are two gay men.
“Edinburgh audiences just didn’t believe me. I’d say it every night, asking if anyone else chose gay godparents, and there’d be silence. The evil, Right-wing b-----d outliberals everyone...”
That’s virtue-signalling, I point out. You’re just as bad as them.
“Yeah, all right, it is. But I still managed to be a d--- about it, didn’t I?”
‘I used to hide the Daily Telegraph inside a copy of Razzle’