Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Comedian, writer and broadcaster, best known for his BAFTA-winning TV series TV Burp and surreal send-ups of British pop culture.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
The book
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:16So talk me through that feeling of coming up with a really good idea. When a joke works, how do you know?
How do you know? Well, I love jokes. Well, my favourite type of joke is set up punchline, which is quite old-fashioned, really. The truth is, you never know. I mean, sometimes you really know straight away, but nine times out of ten, you don't know. And if you look back over history, there are only, you know, a few jokes, really, the types of joke, and it's just a way of reinventing them. I'm really interested in the form of jokes. I mean, you know, I'm sure this isn't of interest to most people, but just the form of it and how you can subvert that. So I, you know, I do a lot of stuff with my ventriloquist dummy Gary, my son Gary, from my first marriage.
Presenter asks
6:45What did you enjoy about growing up in a big family like that?
Uh well, I mean I'm not sure I did like being in a big family. I probably would have preferred to have had a bit more, you know, um … The thing about being in a big family is you can never get any privacy. It was a relatively small house, you know, on this big sort of 60s housing estate out in rural. I mean, I grew up in Kent and the thing with a big family, you just can't get away from the sort of noise. I just remember, you know, there wasn't a lot of spare money. You know, part the other part of being in a big family is this sense of humour, this kind of gang, where you can all basically gang up on someone. If one of my sisters had a boyfriend, we'd all just pick on him. There's a lot of in jokes. I mean, I guess that's true of all families. We did feel like a unit. You know, my brother was a lot younger than me, maybe four or five years younger than me, and he was very annoying. … I mean, I remember we used to have physical f fights, you know, we used to sort of roll around on the floor. Tickling was very big in the in the seventies. I don't know if people still tickle each other.
Miguel de Cervantes
I think it should be a big book, a thick book that you could also use to kill small mammals with. I started reading it a few years ago... I thought this is funny... so this would be a good opportunity.
The luxury
I thought maybe a bucket and spade, because where's the fun of a sandy beach without the ability to make sand castles?
Presenter asks
9:13Tell me a bit about your mum Jan.
She's great fun. I mean, she's still alive. You know, she's 88 and she's still bright as a button. Yeah, so her and my stepfather, Tony, he um they were in a local amateur dramatics group, staplist amateur dramatics group. He used to write the Panto and he would often be the dame in the panto. … Oh, fairy, you know, she'd be the fairy. Fairy bungle. She was, I don't know what that was. She still does a bit of that. … We'd go da down to Liptons and on the way we'd bump into, you know, misses Harmer a couple of doors down and uh she'd start telling her a story. It was, you know, I'd know some story about something that happened at the school or some local bit of gossip. And then we'd walk on a bit further and she'd see someone else and then she'd she'd start the story. And I and by the time we got to Lipton's, the supermarket, she would have this story completely ironed out, you know, with sort of um … So, I mean, yeah, I guess you pick all this stuff up, uh, subliminally. I mean, I don't know whether that's why I am the way I am, but uh
Presenter asks
27:18Why did you decide to give up medicine for good in 1990? What pushed you to do that?
It had been a long time coming, and then my stepfather died of cancer, and I thought, ah, you know, here's a man that sort of worked all his life. And they'd always used to talk about, you know, what they were going to do in retirement. How old was he? Maybe fifty four? And I thought I don't want that to be me. I mean, the other part of it was that I think if I if I'd said to him, I'm giving up to be a comedian, he would be it would have been quite disapproving. … So kind of … it probably kind of set me free a little bit from that. But really, I was just kind of at the end of my tether with it. I mean, you just know. … So I went to my consultant. He said, Oh, let's have a careers chat He was he was a nice bloke and he seemed quite interested in me and you know I wasn't a bad doctor. You know if I'd sort of stuck at it I probably would have been I don't know I would have ended up as a GP. Actually when I gave it up my mum I said to my mum Look I'm gonna try for a year. I'm gonna give myself a year off to sort of have a go. And she said, What you need to do is get a G P practice with a really strong ematodramatic script, which would have been my future.
Presenter asks
44:11How do you bounce back from something like that? [the X Factor musical I Can't Sing not running long]
You know, if I had to choose one thing from my career that I enjoyed the most, it would be that. I mean, I remember we did all these rehearsals in a different rehearsal room and and they said, Oh, should we go and visit they're putting the set in at the palladium and I remember standing at the back of the and I'd played the palladium. And I remember standing at the back with Steve, right at the back of the dress circle, and I said to him, I'll give it six weeks. I said, There's no way we're gonna fill this And pretty much it was six it ran for six weeks. It became clear to me after a little while that the people who like the X Factor don't really go to musicals and the people who go to musicals don't really like the X Factor. I think it's just a really bad idea. … I wasn't really heartbroken because you can't be heartbroken about this sort of thing. You know, you'd be a complete baby if you actually got really, really upset about professional failure. And I think if you … I didn't have anything riding on it. I mean, apart from ego and kind of the amount of time I'd invested in it. But I was I welcomed the change. It was pretty much one of the first things I did after T V Birth finished. I didn't want to go and do another T V show. I wanted to have some fun and it was just enormous fun from start to finish.
Presenter asks
45:39How do you think you'll get on [on the desert island]?
I think I'll be okay in a way. Those old Cub Scout skills, you know, I I used to be able to do a few knots, you know, uh round turn two and a half inches. It was a speciality. You know, we used to lash things together. I remember I made a wash stand once. I mean it's not the first thing you'd make. But if you need … Yeah, so I'm I'm kinda handy like that. For T V Burp, I watch pretty much ep every episode of Ray Mears. Yeah, that and Bear Grills. You know, I know how to sort of I think you have to hide inside a uh a dead cow, don't you, to keep warm. I think that's what I'll be doing. First night there, I'll probably well, first night I'll probably just sort of, you know. Stay up. Second night I'll be inside the camera. If you need me.
“Because we cut the head off and knitted Simon Cowell.”
“I remember getting in my car, there's an old Toyota Corolla. P. Reg Carolla. Driving out of the hospital car park. I turned on the radio and the tune that came on was Eric Burden and the Animals, You've Gotta Get Out of This Place. It's no word of a lie. I mean, I'm sure I must have Confabulated, you know, I must've, it must have been the second song or the third song, but that is my memory. And I remember driving away, the kind of weight lifted, and I thought, wow, this is. This is it really exciting and it was it was incredibly exciting And terrifying in equal measure. Yeah.”
“I went on and I got the first gag got a laugh and it completely threw me. Because I had been rehearsing it without laughs.”
“Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Uh, you know, the it's not the funniest people that get on, it's the pushiest. And I was, um, very pushy. Yeah.”
“I worked for a long time with a friend of mine, Steve Brown, who's my musical director. … And we were best of friends. I say were because he died in February 2024. Oh, sorry. Yeah, and it was quite sudden. And I haven't really come to terms with it, if I'm honest. So there's a big gap.”