Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A comedian known for stand-up success and raising £4.2 million for Sport Relief by completing a 290-mile triathlon in five days.
On the island
Eight records
the reason for his choice was that the Beatles invaded his house when his brother Eddie started bringing them in; he fell in love with them and uses the song as his karaoke song.
chosen because his middle son Luke, a dancer, sent it back when John texted his kids asking for favourite records; it reminds him of the 1980s disco era.
his parents were big country and western fans and his mother was a Jim Reeves fan; he says the words are brilliant and are about the happiness of childhood.
Ed King, Gary Rossington, Ronnie Van Zant
chosen because his oldest son Joe plays it a lot, and it reminds John of the time he worked for a drug company and fell in love with the blues while travelling to Chicago.
he thinks Elvis is an iconic performer and the song lifts the hairs on the back of your neck.
Don’t You (Forget About Me)Favourite
when he met Melanie she made a tape for him and this was the first song on it; it is her favourite song and he hated it during the split because it seemed to play everywhere.
when he and Melanie split up and he was at his lowest, he played this album to death; it became part of his DNA and now he listens to David Gray two or three times a week to relax.
Gary Lightbody, Nathan Connolly, Paul Wilson, Jonny Quinn, Tom Simpson
it reminds him of his youngest son Daniel; when Daniel was about ten or eleven he was lying in bed, looked at his mum and started singing the lines of this song; John nearly choked up and walked out.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:15When you told your three sons you were going to give up your job and try your hand as a stand-up, the first thing they said very quickly was, 'But you're not funny' — is it true?
Yeah, and they often repeat that now.
Presenter asks
1:33You're around about 30 – your first spot was in your early thirties. How did that come about?
No, no, it was just before my thirty-fifth birthday. [We] split up with Melanie, my wife … I said I'll have [the kids] every weekend … and Mondays were the most miserable days in the world … I used to just sit there, do the telephone conference, get drunk during it and be miserable … I thought, what am I doing? … So I thought I need something on a Monday night to go to … I knew there was a comedy club in Manchester … I just went and the guy on the door said it's an open mic night … and if you put your name down, you don't have to pay. And I thought, that's four quid she's not getting, so I put my name down and I went in. And I just thought, I've got nothing to lose.
Presenter asks
3:31[After that first night,] if somebody wrote [what happened next] in a Hollywood rom-com script, most people would say, 'That's ludicrous.' Tell me what happened a few weeks later.
The keepsakes
The luxury
a lifetime supply of toothpaste and toothbrushes
if you're able to clean your teeth, you just feel fresh.
It was actually nearly nine months to a year later. I went back, did it a couple of times, got into it, got asked to do a few gigs … I walked on the stage one night and I used to do a joke about splitting up me wife. The joke was, 'we split up, but it's not that bad, we're not divorced or anything, I've just killed her. But I knew I'd miss her, so I kept her head in the fridge.' … as I said that joke, I looked to the left, and the head that was meant to be in the fridge was sat in the audience. … We then met at the bar and she basically just said, 'You were the person I met. You were back to the person I fell in love with.' And at the time she was refusing to sign the final papers, so we went to Relate … We got back together after being apart for two years. I regard the relationship now as like the second marriage 'cause we are two different people now.
Presenter asks
6:36[In the Sport Relief challenge] you had to ride a bicycle from Paris to Calais, then row the Channel with Freddie Flintoff, Davina McCall and Denise Lewis, then run just over a marathon a day for the final three days from the coast back to London. There's a bit in the documentary where you say, 'What I feel like doing is sitting in the corner crying and sucking my thumb right now, but I've got to get on the bike.' How bad did it get and how did you get over those feelings of fear?
I think the great difficulty with anything like this is trying to match everyone's expectation. … David Walliams was there and David said to me, 'How are you?' … I said, 'I'm okay.' He said, 'But how's your head?' I said, 'Well, that's the thing that's battered.' … You don't realize until you finish something how much it's occupied your mind. So there's a lot of come down, I suppose, associated with it.
Presenter asks
11:07Your success has been fast and furious – it started with a kind of midlife crisis as your marriage broke down and your stand-up career got going. What did your parents expect you to do growing up?
I think the difficulty is the aspirations that anyone could have placed in front of them can only be based on what you see. When I was sixteen, I was doing O levels … and nobody had really done O-levels in our family. … I decided to go back and do A levels … and it started the sixth form, and seven people out of the two thousand said they would stay on. … I went back for a day … and the school said you can't come in those [jeans] … So I went and I got a job at ICI, the local chemical factory, as a male lad … it looked like that was going to be my future.
Presenter asks
19:19Your material grows with your life – you started by talking about the breakup of your marriage. But now, if your life has become being in a BBC dressing room and wondering why there's fizzy water when you asked for still – does that make generating material more difficult?
There is, I suppose, or there was a fear that that would be the case. The material is still based on the fact that I can still say the stories and say, 'Isn't it mad that I'm at the Albert [Hall]? Isn't it mad that I'm doing this?' … I do spend my whole life walking around hoping something funny happens, 'cause that's really all I've got.
Presenter asks
24:22At the point when you had a good job, a company car, you were travelling to Chicago – it was a very respectable life. When you turned to Melanie and said, 'I want to have a go at comedy,' what was her response?
Supportive. I mean, she just said, 'Look, you know, there's something you gotta do.' … after I'd left school I'd gone to ICI to work. I bumped into an English teacher who said I could come back and do my A levels … I remember [my dad] sitting down with me after tea … trying to persuade me not to do it. … And I just kept on saying, 'I don't know why, but I think there's something more.' And my dad just concluded by saying, 'Right, well, you gotta do it … 'Cause if you don't do it, you'll never know.' And it was the same with Melly when I said I want to give up the job and have a go at comedy. She went, 'Well, if you don't do it, you won't know. But … we've got bills to cover, so make sure you're funny.'
“I feel like I've nicked someone else's life. Somewhere there's a sales rep going, 'Haven't I got a gig tonight?'”
“One thing that I know is I've already won, 'cause I'll never ever fall back to where I started from.”
“I just couldn't believe that I was there and I couldn't believe I was getting a standing ovation just for saying words to a room full of strangers. It was amazing.”
“I know that I'm … talking in the house and they're texting me back. 'Why do I have to come downstairs?' 'Cause I've told you to.' 'Cause it just avoids shouting.”
“I don't want to be fifty and saying, 'You know what I could have been.' I thought I'd rather have a go and fail than be a successful man.”