Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Comedian known for tightly crafted jokes with proper punchlines, reveling in the inappropriate, and performing around 250 live gigs a year.
On the island
Eight records
It's just so positive. I don't think there's any other gift in life as good as having a positive disposition, being a happy person. And it hasn't always been that way, but I'm I'm a very happy person. I don't know what he's talking about half the time, Kanye West, but he's just kind of wonderfully out there.
Because that's the album that came out when I was sort of leaving school. You know, friends got cars, we could borrow our parents' car, you could drive round and be free, and that's the soundtrack to those years. That to me reminds me of getting through school and the freedom of kind of, right, we're out of that now, and we kind of felt like mini grown-ups.
I used to go to the Slough Records Centre every Monday with my mum, and we would buy records together. … We would go and buy records, and then we would take them home, and we would play them and dance around the living room. And it was a real kind of ritual … I really, really remember in our house getting this song home. And weirdly, even now when I dance, there's a real family dance. We have a weird little groove shuffle thing that my mum used to do. That's exactly how I dance now. It almost makes me a bit kind of tearful to think, but it's the same move. And I remember dancing around the living room to this and being happy.
And the Pixies were a band that kind of carried me through. And I always thought they were just an incredible group. And this song, it's quite a hard song. It's Where Kirk Cobain got the riff for Smells Like Teen Spirit. And for me, it just kind of reminds me of all my kind of college years.
I Will Follow You Into the DarkFavourite
For me it's kind of a an atheist hymn, and you know I do miss the singing. … when you lose your religion you kind of lose like all the best songs for hundreds of years were all about God. … But this to me feels like it's uh it's kind of a nice thing to be an atheist I think because you become a humanist and you sort of think well we're sort of you know humans are incredible and you've got this one life and it's we're so privileged to be alive and it's not going to last forever.
is the song that best sums up my Edinburgh experiences. … Discovering Edinburgh, going up there for the first time and doing these new act competitions and going, Oh, this is oh, like like a paradise, like an absolute paradise. I'm kind of out of it now, but those years were just incredible. And this song, it was just always around and for me it really summed up Edinburgh.
It's a song that just really reminds me of being on the road. It was kind of my walk on music for a lot of years. … the lyric of it just seems to be about looking back when you were young and where you've ended up and would you be happy with that? And I think I'm you know it sounds smug but I'm really pleased the turn that I took to do this with my life.
I think this is maybe the best pop record ever, it's partly about having friends over and this being on and feeling like, oh, this is like a dance floor filler, and I'm gonna do my little dance like my mum's dance and dance around the kitchen, having fun with friends. It's partly about that, and it's partly a love song, and it's the kind of love that I've experienced. I think I've been very lucky that it's been fun. It's a really upbeat love song, and most love songs, especially on this show, are quite melancholy. There's a lot of ache, and I'm not a big fan of the ache, I'm a big fan of the fun, joyous, party.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:39Does it bug you when the press takes something you said at a gig and asks the group of people at whom it was aimed what they think of it?
Not not so much. If you sort of believe in free speech, if you think I've got the right to say that, then they've got the right to be offended. … Just because they're offended doesn't make them right. … no one remembers the jokes … they don't remember what I said. No one ever remembers what you say. They remember how you make them feel.
Presenter asks
3:49Who is your sounding board for the material?
Oh, the audience. I constantly have a file on my phone. I'm constantly, I'll be halfway through dinner going, right? I've got to just write down. I've had a half an idea for something. And it's that thing of I never edit when I'm trying to be creative. Always write, never refuse the muse, is the line, isn't it? You just, if you think anything might be funny, write it down.
Presenter asks
6:00When the Prime Minister commented on your tax affairs, you wrote your own apology statement — didn't you get advice from anyone?
I got advice from friends, but I mean, most of the advice was you just keep quiet, this will go away in a couple of days. But as soon as the Prime Minister comments on something like that, you've got to get out in front of it. And also, you need to own it. … I don't think anyone was buying that line with me. I think people thought he probably knew what he was doing.
The keepsakes
The book
It's not about your favourite book. Because my favourite book I've read. So, how frustrating would it be to get to the desert island and you go, oh, there's one book, brilliant, that'll pass a day, and then, oh, I've read this. Like, it would be Raymond Carver's what we talk about when we talk about love. It was favourite book. But I don't think I would take that because I know it and it's great, but it's I've read it. I would take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
The luxury
I love coffee. I started drinking coffee very early in life. I used to get given a bottle of quite sweet coffee in my cot when I used to go for an afternoon rest. It's terrible parenting, but you know, it was the seventies, it was a different era.
Presenter asks
6:52What did you learn about yourself from [the tax scandal]?
I think the greatest thing it taught me was when you have a friend in trouble, call. … If you have a friend and they're in the paper or they're having a problem with something and you don't know what to say or someone's just died or someone's been diagnosed with something, call them. … When you're in the middle of that, like, oh, could this be a career ender? Could this be something where, oh, he's involved in a thing and now he's not on TV anymore, now he doesn't sell tickets anymore?
Presenter asks
7:26You anticipated my next question … was that [the tax scandal] the worst thing that could have happened — that would have ended your career?
I guess. I mean, with something like that, that's the worst case scenario. So, I mean, you know, even worst case scenario, I've had a pretty good run. … fame as a comic, I think, is all about trajectory. … I've been at the same level for probably 12 years now. That's very lucky to have a long, sustained career in Shobiz. So it's going to disappear at some point.
Presenter asks
25:10Where's the line that you will not cross? What would you not tell a joke about?
I don't think there is a line. … I think anything is fair game for comedy … there's th things in very specific locales that you cannot joke about. But everything else is kind of fine and it's how you do it. It's about the intent. … I would say the one thing that you could never joke about in the UK is Hillsborough. It's a tragedy that's touched people in a very specific way, and I cannot imagine anyone coming up with a joke about that.
“I've got quite a dark sense of humour. Like, they're edgier jokes, or they'd be seen as, you know, taboo to some. You find your audience, so they come to see the show. I'm not shouting these jokes through people's letterboxes. They've come to see the show. They're literally buying into it.”
“I think people thought [he] probably knew what he was doing.”
“The greatest thing [the tax scandal] taught me was when you have a friend in trouble, call.”
“I couldn't read until I was about sort of 10, 11 with any level of ability. … school was not easy for me.”
“I've been diagnosed as having dyslexia, but I sort of think you get to choose your narrative in life. You get to pick what you say and how you say it. And you can define yourself by things. You can be the kid who had dyslexia or you can be the kid that went to Cambridge.”
“I quite like talking about [losing my virginity late] though, because I sort of think when I really remember being a teenager and thinking, this is I'm not normal, I'm weird. … I think I was a little bit kind of repressed.”
“If I'm right about this god, all the others are wrong. … And that struck me as an incredibly arrogant viewpoint. … And when [my religion] went, there was a real sense of loss.”