Dominic CAVENDISH
WHERE DID I GO RIGHT?
‘I grew up on a council estate, my dad was a trade union man – I should be Labour’
Who is Geoff Norcott? You’d be forgiven for replying: I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue. He has written for this paper and pops up on TV. But compared with the leviathans he swims alongside in the comedy pool – your Michael McIntyres, your Frankie Boyles
– he’s a minnow; on the rise, for sure, but not the sort of star whose memoir you’d race to buy at the hour of its publication.
“What” is Geoff Norcott, however, is a more interesting question. He is one of the few stand-ups in the UK to whom the label “Right-wing comedian” is liberally applied. Given that he “came out” as a Conservative voter in a show called Geoff Norcott Occasionally Sells Out in 2013, it’s a description that technically fits. But of course, in the generally Left-leaning world of stand-up, the label “Right-wing” is anathema, almost tantamount to “fascist”. So what Geoff Norcott is, also, is a little brave. If he kept a lid on his political allegiances, he’d be on the inside track, one of the liberal-approved gang.
His debut book – Where Did I Go Right? – isn’t just a frank, lighthearted account of how Norcott, 44, came from working-class origins in south London to forge a career in comedy. It’s a sober mapping of the changing political landscape, and the shifts that propelled him to speak his mind, and find it to be a Tory one – in so doing making him, in comedy circles, a near-anomaly.
One might conclude a Tory tendency was in his bones from early days: he relives his annoyance at coming home from school to find his mum has been slacking all day, say, and notes at admiring length that he and John Major went to the same school (Rutlish, in Merton). Yet there was little in those circumstances to fast-track him Right-wards.
As he says at the start: “I’m a comedian who grew up on a council estate with two disabled parents, and my dad was a trade union man.” That context begets assumptions in others: “It’s obvious to everyone I meet that I should be Labour through and through.” The next 300-odd pages lay out the process of finding his political home. That’s bound up, as the book’s subtitle – How the Left Lost Me
– suggests, with feeling ever more out of kilter with the supposed workers’ party. “How the Left lost me” is a phrase that should haunt Sir Keir Starmer et al. Looking at the collapse of the “red wall”, at the last general election and recent local elections, there does seem to be a lot of disgruntled Geoffs out there.
The country’s shy Tories aren’t so shy these days but the supremely (if too stolidly) measured tone of Norcott’s book reminds us that the last thing, career-wise, a comic from their ranks should do is express jubilant vindication at being on the winning side. The book opens with an account of taking part in Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night in 2019, the hour of the Tory landslide. A shock-wave passes through the right-on audience as the news comes in, flattening his natter with Stanley Johnson. In the green room, it’s like a wake. “I wouldn’t mind at least one person to have a silent fist bump with but it seems I’m totally alone.”
As memorable recent vignettes go, it’s a rather too isolated one. His rough and tumble – and skint
– youth may lack the trauma of Billy Connolly’s childhood, and nor is it as madcap as that of other workingclass mirth-makers (take a bow, Lee Evans), but it’s vividly evoked. Thereafter, though, high-adrenalin scenarios – touring warzone Afghanistan, the sweaty immediacy (pre-Covid) of gigs galore – seem to get less airtime than summarising political administrations and the staging-post moments at university, in sales and teaching. The tone is chummily blokey – but more Starmer than BoJo, short of ripe phraseology. When I first saw Norcott, at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe, he was a gag-a-minute merchant, spewing honest truths and quips like “Jeremy Corbyn wants to take us back to the Seventies. Of all the decades to go back to, why couldn’t he take us back to one where we trusted the entertainers?” This memoir needs more of that punchy stuff. It could do, too, with getting its hands dirty under the bonnet of the material: how do you fashion a Right-wing joke or make a Lefty crack a smile? He offers a few primers (“Do you detect hypocrisy, hyperbole or hysteria? If any of these exist, you have a target”) but could offer pages more. Having alighted on a fascinating subject area, he scarcely roams its fruitful avenues. Is he actually in quite good company? Eric Morecambe congratulated Margaret Thatcher on her 1979 win; Ken Dodd was a true blue. Furthermore, didn’t Thatcherism not only shake up politics but indirectly breed a profusion of comics? Mrs T was (and still is) a satirical target, but she also fostered the entrepreneurial template that has made millionaires of many wags. What of America? And is today’s Right-wing comedy reactionary-minded or revolutionary in spirit, given that it’s often tackling institutional “correctness”?
With all this, as with his passing thoughts on voting Leave, and the rise of wokeness (an unending gift to commonsensical types like Norcott), you’re left wanting more. But perhaps, at this belated breakthrough moment for him, that’s only... right.