Interview: Milton Jones
Paradise found
The wonderful comic world of Milton Jones is coming to town, providing the perfect escape from the end of summer and a highlight of The Brighton Comedy Festival. Victoria Nangle talks comedy, God and hairbrushes with him
Could you tell us what we could expect from your show this year?
“No one’s going to have a change of lifestyle or political opinion. It’s going to be just jokes. And if people don’t like jokes they won’t like it. It’s just stupid stuff for the best part of two hours. Silly escapism, is another way of putting it. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, it’s just lots of face-pulling, arm-pulling and leg-pulling, basically. It’s all nonsense.
“I get a very wide demographic, from kids to old people because I’ve done radio and Mock The Week and things. It’s kind of like, you look out and think: ‘This lot should be first on the lifeboats’. It’s a real mixture. Which is quite nice, because it’s a semi-panto sort of feel. And also because many of them haven’t even been to a comedy club before, they don’t know necessarily how to behave, or… a child will just suddenly start talking to me. It’s not like, you know, a rough late-night comedy thing at all, it’s all quite informal.”
Who’s your support act this time?
“It’s a chap called Chris Martin. Not that one. He’s an up-and-coming young lad who has a slightly different style to me. He goes round in a car with me. Actually we play backstage football before the show.”
With a football?
“With a foam football and two small nets, just behind the stage, and it’s actually become more important than the show itself, unfortunately. So, if the show has to be cancelled at short notice because one of us has a broken leg, um… well, it’s a real possibility, actually. It’s become very competitive. So, yes.
Might be worth mentioning.”
You said in the past that, after the show, with a quiet shirt and a hairbrush you can just pass by unnoticed. Is that still the case?
“Well, I think it’s more the case now that people double-take. They know they know me from somewhere, but they can’t quite place me because I’m not in uniform. They quite often think they used to know me at university… they say ‘hello’ but they’ve no idea why. It sort of gives me just enough time to get away. Whereas, actually the worst is to see a bunch of school kids coming towards me, because one of them will work out where they’ve seen me. And then it’s a case of, you know, getting away.”
Sharper minds!
“Yeah, yeah, they have much sharper minds.”
Do you have a writing process?
“[chuckles] Yes. That’s quite a good heckle. I think you can’t put a quantity on it. What I do is I book myself into new material nights. Like, tonight I’m going up to Oxford to a small club, at short notice, and I’ll just go on with bits of paper, and just try out a load of stuff. And if anything doesn’t work I’ll say someone else wrote it. That’s the only way, really. And now that I know that I’m doing that, I’ll have a productive day because there’s nothing like the fear of facing an audience.”
There’s been a trend for some time of comics using atheism in their material, and more recently conversely spiritual beliefs. As a Christian, what do you think about people bringing up their religious beliefs in their shows?
“It depends how they do it. There’s nothing wrong with that. It depends also on your style; it’s awkward for me because I’m just doing jokes and people don’t quite know… it’s quite hard for me to put anything serious in at all because I’m constantly setting stuff up and whipping carpets from under it. But there’s nothing wrong with it. I think it’s dangerous to preach, whether you’re an atheist or a Christian or whatever you believe, because preaching by its nature isn’t as funny.
“There’s nothing like the fear of facing an audience”
“Even in EastEnders, if they do an episode on drug abuse or something, you can feel slightly patronised if the writing’s a bit clunky.
Other people can do it. Robin Ince, or Richard Herring, or whoever it is, can talk about stuff like that, because that’s in their style. Possibly I’ve seen a few people do it and it’s a bit gratuitous, it’s a bit, sort of, ‘jumping on the bandwagon’, because people who have faith are sort of a soft target. Apart from Muslim extremists, of course. But certainly bashing Christians and people who believe things. It’s far easier, comedically, to take a point of view of unbelief, because you’re by definition being a bit negative. It’s harder to be funny and take a positive stand on faith, I think. I’m proving what I’m saying now by not being funny about it, but I think that’s true. And that’s why I don’t do it, because that’s not my job in that environment.”
I enjoy you on the radio and I think the surrealism works well in that medium. Do you ever think you’ll move over to television again?
“I’d like to. I mean, I’ve slightly got stuck on radio. It’s a great medium, as you say, and it’s a different sort of audience because it’s people driving along and people making their tea or whatever. But the problem I’ve had leaping to television has been: ‘Oh, well you can’t do that because it’s a bit wordy’. And it’s wordy because it’s on the radio. So I would very much like to make the jump to visual, because I think I can do that as well, I just haven’t done as much of it. In fact, we’ve got a sitcom treatment in with the BBC at the moment, and hopefully that’ll take off. But we’ll see. I’d love to do more visual stuff. But radio is great, because I can still be writing it as the audience come in to the auditorium. In TV you have to send out a script a few weeks in advance so that everyone knows what they’re doing. There’s something nice about radio; it’s just someone talking into a microphone. And you can read it, you don’t have to learn it. That’s the best bit.”
You’ve been nominated for, and won awards for 18 years. How important do you think they are for the comedy industry?
“They’re a bit like the equivalent of letters after your name in science. If you read a thesis by a scientist you’d see the doctorates he got from different universities. In comedy terms, awards are a bit random but if someone’s got a few behind them, they’re probably qualified to do what they’re doing. There are a lot of awards in comedy, and a lot of spurious ones. It doesn’t mean anything particularly if you don’t win one any particular year, but they’re useful for posters. If I ever get enough money, what I’ll do is hire a private investigator to go back and research all the quotes at the Edinburgh Festival that are on posters, and see what percentage of them are true, and then name and shame people.”
Milton Jones – On The Road,
Concert Hall, Brighton Dome, Thursday 10 October 2013, 8pm, £20, 01273 709709,
www.brightoncomedyfestival.com
