Masked Singer Joel Dommett is good at keeping secrets but not when it comes to the secrets of panelist Jonathan Ross
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 fun for us to go in and be like, ‘oh, he’s decided to bring this chair. His armchairs’. He also has racks full of magazines. He has all these different vinyls, posters, art for the walls. So, when I’m just sat there in a plain dressing room he’s got a beautiful boudoir.”
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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”.
Joel says: “He’s like this encyclopedia of knowledge about this business. His wife is an incredible writer, I can’t imagine the conversations they must have in bed.” He also has some rather unexpected secrets about Jonathan’s boudoir.
Joel, 40, says: “I have been to Jonathan’s house. Jonathan has a raised floor in a dressing room at home which comprises of Perspex which must have been brilliant when he put it in, in the 90s and I’m guessing the boxes contain individual pairs of shoes.
“He has like a little button thing that he presses and then each of the shoes rise up. You then get the shoes out and the Perspex box goes back down. When I was there the box had broken, so he had to get the shoes out one by one!”
As well as an extensive collection of suits, Jonathan has a bar and an art collection that Joel says is “worth nothing to anybody apart from him.” Gushing about another co-star, he continues: “Davina [McCall] has become sort of my TV mother who looks like she’s my sister. She looks fantastic. Whatever age she looks, she looks incredible.”
Pulling in around 4.5 million viewers with its cast of mystery celebrities dressed as characters such as Pufferfish, Wolf, Moth and Arctic Fox, The Masked Singer has been a consistent success for ITV since its launch in 2020. Speaking on the Rob Brydon podcast, Joel admits his first reaction to joining the show 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!”
On another occasion, he ran into the audience to find out who this man’s daughter thought she had seen. I think it was the O2 in London,” he says, recalling how the little girl announced that it was Whitney Houston. Immediately 12,000 people were just laughing at one six-year-old, because Whitney was dead. Bless her heart. Bless her heart,” he says.
A household name now, thanks to shows like The Masked Singer, Joel says it is a far cry from his early life on his famly’s farm in Gloucestershire. He says: “I grew up on a very small farm, it was very isolated, middle of nowhere. It was quite a decent walk to the nearest person who was the same sort of age as me. So I just sort of hung out on a hay bale.”
And he cut his teeth in comedy after moving to London, where he befriended comic James Acaster who inspired him to follow his stand-up dreams. Recalling how he went to comedy clubs, he says: “Every single night, I’d have this little bike that I bought in a charity shop. And so because I had a bike, it gave me the opportunity to do more gigs.
“So I’d do like two or three a night, just riding my bike from place to place, get there all sweaty, go on stage, do it again, go home, write notes. I had this little flat in Elephant and Castle [south London] that I sort of sublet from my friend. Really cheap, unbelievably 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 still tours as a stand-up and is preparing for the rest of his Happy Idiot UK tour next month. He says: “Why did I call the tour Happy Idiot? I think it sort of sums me up. I think actually it sums up my comedic style quite well, really.” Off stage, Joel says his wife Hannah helps keep him grounded, as does their two-year old son Wilde.
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.”
But fame has been known to disrupt family life, according to Joel, who recalls how drunken students cheekily shouting The Masked Singer’s famous catchphrase “Take it off, take it off” outside his home in Shepperton, Surrey, led to him erecting a gate and growing a hedge.
He says: “We moved five years ago. The house was very open and nice and then we had the problem of people kept on knocking on my door and running away and shouting, ‘Take it off, take it off, take it off’. Funny to them but it really scares my wife. So we got a gate and a hedge. How does that affect deliveries? Well, it makes life harder. But actually it’s good because we have had a few parcels stolen from outside our door!”
The Masked Singer is on ITV, Saturdays at 6.30pm. Joel’s new Happy Idiot UK tour starts next month.
