Joel Dommett, a mask singer, excels at keeping secrets, but not Jonathan Ross, a panelist’s secrets.
Joel Dommett is trusted to keep the identities of celebrities competing in The Masked Singer secret.
But, ahead of the new series starting on ITV tonight, he reveals some hilarious gaffes from past series and exposes the dressing room secrets of panelist Jonathan Ross.
He tells The Mirror: “His dressing room is like a boutique. He gets a whole van to arrive at his house the day before filming, picks up all of this stuff. It’s different stuff every time.
It’s entertaining for us to enter and think, “Oh, he’s decided to bring this chair.” His armchairs. Additionally, he has magazine racks abound. He has a ton of different wall art, posters, and vinyls. He has a gorgeous boudoir when I’m just sat there in a plain dressing room.
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However, Jonathan’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the showbiz world is an asset when it comes to guessing the identities of the stars taking part, alongside fellow panelists comic Mo Gilligan, Love Island presenter Maya Jama and TV presenter Davina McCall, who Joel calls his “TV mum”.
He’s like an encyclopedia of business knowledge, Joel says. I can’t imagine the conversations his wife and his wife must have in bed. She is an incredible writer. He also shares some untold tales about Jonathan’s boudoir.
Joel, 40, states, “I visited Jonathan’s home. In his dressing room, Jonathan had a raised floor made of Perspex, which must have been fantastic when he installed it in the 1990s, and I’m guessing that each pair of shoes will be contained in separate boxes.
He presses a “little button” to make each pair of shoes rise up. The Perspex box then descends when you take the shoes out. When I arrived, the box had broken, so he had to take the shoes out one by one.
Jonathan has a bar and an art collection that Joel claims are “worth nothing to anyone other than him,” in addition to his extensive collection of suits. He continues, “Davina [McCall] has become sort of my TV mother who looks like she’s my sister,” blatantly referring to another co-star. She appears fantastic. She looks incredible no matter what age she is.
The Masked Singer has attracted around 4.5 million viewers since its launch in 2020 thanks to its cast of enigmatic celebrities dressed as Pufferfish, Wolf, Moth, and Arctic Fox. Joel admits that his first thought when he first started joining the podcast was, “What is this nonsense?”
But, delighted to be part of the “nonsense,” he also says there have been some hilarious bloopers. He laughs, remembering one moment during an arena show with Rita Ora. He says: “She genuinely thought one of the singers was Muhammad Ali. And she didn’t know that Muhammad Ali has left us. And also the fact that she thought Muhammad Ali would be there!”
He also searched the audience for the man’s daughter to discover who she believed to have seen on another occasion. He claims that it was the O2 in London in reference to the young woman’s confirmation that Whitney Houston was the subject. Because Whitney was dead, immediately 12, 000 people were merely laughing at the six-year-old. She deserves all praise. He claims, “Bless her heart.”
Joel, who is now a household name, describes it as a far cry from his early years on his family’s farm in Gloucestershire, thanks to shows like The Masked Singer. He states, “I was raised in the middle of nowhere on a very small farm. The closest person, who was my age, was quite a distance away. I basically sat on a hay bale.
And he eventually found his voice in comedy after moving to London, where he met comic James Acaster, who inspired him to pursue his stand-up dreams. He recalls how he used to frequent comedy clubs, recalling that he had a “little bike” that he had bought in a charity shop every night. And so, I had the chance to do more gigs because I had a bike.
So I’d spend two or three nights riding my bike from place to place until I was sweaty before going on stage again, going home, and taking notes. I sublet my friend’s tiny apartment in Elephant and Castle [south London] for a while. Really, really, really cheap.
“And then all the comedians used to come back to my house and we would just watch YouTube, which was a very new thing at that time, until like 4am – watching these American acts in the Laugh Factory. The generation before us, they just had to buy DVDs. But suddenly, we had a wealth of comedy, good, bad, different styles. It just felt like such an exciting time.”
Joel is gearing up for the rest of his Happy Idiot UK tour next month while he continues to perform stand-up. Why was the tour called “Happy Idiot,” he asks. It kind of sums up what I believe. Actually, I believe it pretty much sums up my comedic style. Off-stage, Joel claims that his two-year-old son Wilde and his wife Hannah keep him grounded.
At the end of last year, Joel and his family spent six weeks in Australia, joining Ant and Dec, for the last series of I’m A Celebrity – where he bonded with Ant as his one-year-old son is called Wilder. Joel, who hosts I’m a Celebrity…Unpacked, laughs: “The whole family went. It’s just nice to have Wilde and Wilder together.”
However, Joel claims that fame has been known to stifle family life when drunken students in Shepperton, Surrey, cheekily yelled “Take it off, take it off” before he built a gate and raised a hedge.
He claims that the couple relocated five years ago. The house was very welcoming and welcoming, but then someone knocked on my door, ran away, and yelled “Take it off, take it off, take it off” several times. They’re funny, but my wife is really scared by it. So we needed a hedge and a gate. What impact does that have on deliveries? It does, however, make life more difficult. However, it’s good because a few packages have been taken from outside our door. “
Source: Mirror
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