Trigger Happy star Dom Joly’s wild life from sacking and arrest to comeback

Now a 57-year-old dad, with two grown-up children, Dom Joly is packing up his outrageous costumes – including that three-foot phone – and hitting the road for a live tour of the show.

It’s his first ever stand-up, despite being in comedy for decades, and the nerves are building. “I’ve only done one live show and that was the Secret Policeman’s Ball”, he smiles.

“So my first live experience ever was Wembley Arena… it’s been downhill ever since”. Trigger Happy TV ran on Channel 4 from 2000 to 2003, the brainchild of Dom and his friend Sam Cadman, who captured Dom’s mad sketches on camera.

Dom and Sam would head to their local pub to determine what to do after the half-hour show, where they would dress up as anything they could find in their favorite Camden costume shop, including a man-sized squirrel, a boy scout, a gorilla wielding a baseball bat, and pose as anything they could find. Before the filming, I simply wrote, “I never wrote anything.” All of Trigger Happy was just trying to make Sam laugh”, Dom confesses.

To the dismay of drivers forced to stop and wait for him, he found himself wearing a giant snail costume and crawling around on the famous zebra crossing outside Abbey Road studios. “First take, absolutely bang on”, he remembers. “We were so adrenalised, we knew we had it but we did it again. The car that stopped then opened its doors, allowing these police to leave. They made an effort to detain me as the snail.

The plot relied on a disgruntled audience to enjoy Dom’s tricks, with the most unexpected twist frequently occurring when the camera was turned off. He claims that he has lost track of the number of people who refused to sign release forms after being caught with a non-wife or their spouse. “We once did a thing at the Prince Charles cinema]in the West End] – this was 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon.

We made fun of the joke, then we abruptly stopped the movie, apologized to the audience, explained that we were filming a TV show, and requested that anyone who didn’t want to be on TV let us know. Six couples all rose up, and it turned out to be having affairs! I was shocked by the number of bad people we ran into.

Dom’s most famous bit is, ironically, his least favourite -that enormous phone. He was on a train moments after the first episode of the now-familiar Nokia ringtone aired in January 2000. Three people stood up and shouted, ‘ HELLO?! YEAH I’M ON THE TRAIN – IT’S RUBBISH! ‘ I was like, ‘ f***. What is happening? ‘ “It’s a catchphrase that has haunted him for 25 years”. I swear there’s not a day where it doesn’t happen. Even on the way here a bloke spotted me and shouted, ‘ HELLO?! ‘ And still, 25 years later, I haven’t had a positive response! Like, ‘ Yes, hello! ‘ “

Of course, not every idea worked”. So many scenes went wrong, but the worst we did was with Sarah Ferguson, “he groans”. We enter King’s Road and blag some free drinks as we were passing the Duke of York barracks as we passed by it. Suddenly we spot Fergie sitting in the corner on her own, so we say, ‘ let’s do it’. When we approach her, she appears irate and asks, “Good morning, Your Majesty, you are live on Good Morning Mexico– do you have anything to say to the Mexican people?”

After a while, I ask her to pause because we’ve taken a commercial break, and she might be completely frozen. She begins to blab into this tiny camera. In the middle of this drinks party, Sam, Sam, and the Duchess of York are all shivering for three minutes. Then we leg it. We had a fax from her lawyers by the time we returned to our office, but regrettably, we couldn’t take the photos.

As bizarrely strange as some of his sketches, Dom’s comedy path was. He spent his early years in Lebanon, Lebanon torn apart by the civil war, hearing bombs and machine gunfire. He’s previously spoken about experiencing anxiety and depression, and now says he” probably has some post-traumatic stress “from those times.

At seven, he went to boarding school in Oxford”. I f***ing hated it, “he says fervently”. My dad also went aged seven and in that very British way, he thought, ‘ I’ll do the same thing. ‘ So I attended school with Tim Henman, the majority of the last Tory cabinet, and some Radiohead when I was eight and twelve. It was very strange. “

After taking a politics degree, Dom was working as a runner at MTV when he was offered a job in Prague as a diplomat, thanks to his fluency in four languages (Arabic, Czech, French and English). When Frank Zappa and Lou Reed were honorary consuls, he spent a year there for six months. Allies and poets made up the government, with no exception. And it was amazing, “he says.

Dom found employment as a TV producer after returning to the UK and was asked to speak with politicians outside of parliament. He admits that because I couldn’t take it seriously, I used to improvise in the background of the photo.

” Once we were interviewing]former Conservative minister] David Mellor about football hooliganism and I got some mates to kick a ball around nearby. However, when I gave them the signal, the ball “smacked” into David Mellor’s face, which of course became the news headline. “Dom swiftly got fired.

Happily, he quickly found a job with The Mark Thomas Comedy Product, a 1996 docu-series that combined surrealism with serious politics to highlight topical issues. Dom’s first day involved driving a tank, a clown car and a hot tub through a McDonald’s Drive-Thru.

After that he worked on Paramount Comedy’s War of the Flea, where he filled Peter Mandelson’s garden with Millennium Domes and” took the p*** “out of Cool Britannia”. Even Oasis was watching it at the time it was getting quite cult-like. I met Noel]Gallagher] and he said he and Liam used to watch our stuff, “Dom recalls.

Soon after Channel 4 came knocking. Dom was instructed to “just do something funny” by Caroline Leddy, the head of comedy, when he had planned to write yet another political satire. He hired then-barman Sam to be his cameraman, and their show exploded.

While Trigger Happy had millions of fans, Dom’s father, John, never saw it. The pair’s relationship had deteriorated during Dom’s school days and, after his parents separated, they barely spoke for 15 years”. He was so old-school, the only piece of advice he ever gave me was, ‘ you can only leave a job once, but after that nobody will trust you’. “They reconciled ten years before John’s death, after he was diagnosed with dementia.

” He became a really soft person, and I became friends with someone who wasn’t my dad, “Dom says. His mum, meanwhile, was” very proud “of his TV work and would support him no matter what he did”. She once observed me while I was wearing a goth band, and she appeared to have put on weight. But then she revealed to me that she had wrapped four pillows around her body because she believed the stage’s octave would pierce her ribs.

Dom’s family – wife Stacey, a ‘ completely humourless ‘ sculptor who holds no truck with his comedy, and their children Parker, 25, and Jackson, 21 – bring him the most joy, along with his dogs, pigs and menagerie of animals, kept at their Cheltenham home.

This year, he and Stacey will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, and they intend to travel to Muskoka, Canada’s “happy place.” She’s an artist, she’s very grounded but she has enough artistic sensibility to put up with my idiocy, “Dom laughs”. For ten years she let me go off and do stuff, she’s incredible. “

*Drop and Sam in Trigger Happy TV – Live! for a four-date tour that starts on October 7. Tickets go on sale from Friday (February 28) at 10am on Ticketmaster.

Source: Mirror