Interview: Lee Hurst
After six seasons of They Think It’s All Over Lee Hurst decided to focus on hosting his own comedy club in London. Now, after ten years, he’s back on the road with a brand new show to tour, and appearing on our tellies. Victoria Nangle catches up with him
So… ‘Too Scared To Leave The House’. You cover so many of society’s scare stories in this show…
“Well, I’ll be honest with you, that was the original idea for the tour, it was going to be called ‘The End of The World Tour’ because of the Mayan calendar etc. And then I googled that, and that site was gone, so I changed it to ‘Whatever happened to acid rain?’. And my two mates, they missed the point, and said: ‘Loads of people won’t know what acid rain is’. Then I said: ‘That’s hardly the point!’. Then they went: ‘But yeah, we don’t like the title, and it looks foolish’. So I’ve come up with this one.
I’d already written a blurb to go with it but the minute I called it that [‘Too Scared To Leave The House’], I thought, actually, this kind of broadens it a little bit. And what I do before the interval is I get the audience to write down fears, and it’s all personal fears. Virtually 99 per cent of the time they just write down things that bother them, as opposed to, you know – nobody is worried about the war on terror, and people are scared of spiders. [laughs] That’s basically it!
If we were asking this to al-Qaeda they’d go over to pull the rucksack out and so to die for Allah, and instead it released spiders, we would probably win!
The show’s just completely turned on its head, it’s all about personal fears. So I’m being totally led by the audience. I’m virtually a politician! [Chuckles]
So you’ve had some brilliant fears come up?
“Oh yes! The very first night I did it, I thought am I going to do the questions tonight, or shall I just do a run out of material? As you need to shake the cobwebs out a bit. And literally, the first few minutes before I went on stage, I thought I’d do the questions, and I was frantically looking for scraps of paper to tear up, and grabbed half a dozen pens, and went out and put them on stage. The third or fourth one in, somebody wrote ‘I’m scared about leaving my love behind’, and I went: ‘Oh my God!
I really never expected it to go like this!’.
People were that honest and that personal about it. Do you know what I mean? You do get spiders, you do get scared of the dark, but you also get some quite detailed things as well.
One that did make me laugh was that somebody put ‘ageing’. Which is unusual, because a standard one would be ‘getting old’. I thought it was odd, so I said that somebody was scared of ageing, and this woman answered, and I could not see because of the lighting, and she said: ‘That’s me!’ And I said: ‘What… you’re frightened of ageing?’, She said: ‘Yes’, and I said: ‘In what way?’. She said: ‘My friends say I look like Bridget Bardot’. And I said: ‘Rrrrright”. And she goes: ‘Have you seen her lately?’
I said: ‘Did you look like her when you where younger?’, and she went: ‘No!’
‘What are you going to do?’
She said: ‘I’ll do anything! Maybe surgery or one of those one hour facelifts!’. Then I said: ‘I think you want it to last a bit longer than that!’. [laughs]
Do you find that you have started gathering more fears for yourself because you have never thought of being scared of that before?
“No! Fortunately, I’m pretty fearless, not in a kind of ‘Give me a Victoria Cross!’ kind of way, but I’m very practical – very logical. Oh, I don’t know, ‘a bit cold blooded’ perhaps might be a better phrase. When it’s about me, it doesn’t matter. I went to Iraq and a bit of Afghanistan. In Iraq we did a road trip, and we were going along roads through the desert and then suddenly there was a concrete block at the side of the road, and the day before they’ve shown you that, they put bombs in concrete blocks, and you can see it just coming up! I remember just looking at it and I just thought to myself, do you know what? If it happens, it happens, so why worry about it? My back was aching more because the body armour made you sit up straight! [giggles]. So I had like a hour and a half of sitting like a ballerina! Quite frankly, a bomb would have given me a break! [Laughs]”
Your biography says that when you got the gig on They Think It’s All Over you didn’t know anything about sports?
“No, I only know Athletics.”
“I loathe football, with an intense hatred. I actually hate football!”
Has it not left you with a new interest?
“No, I loathe football, with an intense hatred. I actually hate football! I mean, that whole thing with the ball boy the other week just indicates what it’s become, you know? Even the ball boy cheats! You know what I mean? I just find it awful. It’s a business, it’s nothing to do with sport.”
Will your show will be available on DVD?
“No, I don’t think it will because it changes every night,and there is so much when people get really involved. It would be really difficult to edit it, because you would end up doing a call back for something else, then that something else might have not been that good to start with, but then later on it becomes really funny, then that means having to put something duff into the DVD! Do you get what I mean?”
Yeah.
“And so it wouldn’t work that way, I’d say it’s highly unlikely, not to say I won’t do a DVD in
the future, but if I did a DVD it would be straight stand up.”
Maybe you could do a board game in the future [Lee devised the comedy show Bring Me The Head Of Light Entertainment]…
“[Laughs] That’s a good idea, no that is a really good idea! I’ll give you a percentage!”
Lee Hurst – Too Scared To Leave The House,
The Old Market, Saturday 23 February 2013, 8pm, £15/12, 01273 201801, www.theoldmarket.com
