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.
The half-hour show saw Dom dressed as anything he and Sam could find in their favourite Camden costume shop – a man-sized squirrel, a boy scout, a gorilla wielding a baseball bat – and they’d go to their local pub to figure out the next steps. “I never wrote anything before we filmed, I just made it up on the spot. All of Trigger Happy was just trying to make Sam laugh,” Dom confesses.
That’s how he found himself wearing a giant snail costume and crawling around on the famous zebra crossing outside Abbey Road studios, to the chagrin of drivers forced to stop and wait for him. “First take, absolutely bang on,” he remembers. “We were so adrenalised, we knew we had it but we did it again. And the second time, the car that stopped opened its doors and these policemen got out. They tried to arrest me as the snail.”
The show hinged on an unsuspecting public going along with Dom’s pranks, with the most unexpected twist often coming when the camera stopped rolling. “I lost count of the number of people who refused to sign release forms because they’d been caught on camera with someone who wasn’t their husband or wife,” he confides. “We once did a thing at the Prince Charles cinema [in the West End] – this was 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon.
“We did the joke then stopped the film and apologised to the audience, explained we’d been filming for a TV show and asked that anyone who didn’t want to be on TV let us know. Six couples all get up and it turned out they were all having affairs! I was astonished at the number of people we encountered who were up to no good.”
Dom’s most famous bit is, ironically, his least favourite -that enormous phone. Just days after the first episode aired in January 2000, he was on a train when he heard that now-familiar Nokia ring tone. “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 25 years later I still don’t have a good response to it! 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 were walking past the Duke of York barracks on King’s Road and there’s a party going on, so we go in and blag some free drinks. Suddenly we spot Fergie sitting in the corner on her own, so we say, ‘let’s do it’. We go right up to her, she looks panicky and I stick my microphone in her face and say, ‘Good morning Your Majesty, you are live on Good Morning Mexico – do you have anything to say to the people of Mexico?’
She starts blabbering on into this tiny camera, and after a while I ask her to pause because we’ve gone to a commercial break, and could she absolutely freeze? And for three minutes, me, Sam and the Duchess of York are frozen in the middle of this drinks party. And then we leg it. By the time we get back to our office there’s a fax from her lawyers and sadly we could never show the footage.”
Dom’s path to comedy was as bafflingly weird as some of his sketches. Born in Beirut to British parents, he spent his early years hearing bombs and machine gunfire as Lebanon tore itself to pieces in the civil war. 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 between the ages of eight and 12 I went to school with most of the last Tory cabinet, Tim Henman and some of Radiohead. 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). He spent a year there just six months after the Velvet Revolution, when Frank Zappa and Lou Reed were honorary consuls. “All the government were opposition figures who were poets and stuff. And it was amazing,” he says.
On his return to the UK, Dom found work as a TV producer and was sent to interview politicians outside parliament. “I couldn’t take it seriously so I used to get people to mess around in the background of the shot,” he admits.
“Once we were interviewing [former Conservative minister] David Mellor about football hooliganism and I got some mates to kick a ball around nearby. But when I gave them the signal the ball went f***ing ‘smack’ into David Mellor’s face, and of course it made the lead bulletin on the news.” 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. “It was getting quite culty – even Oasis were watching it. I met Noel [Gallagher] and he said he and Liam used to watch our stuff,” Dom recalls.
Soon after Channel 4 came knocking. Head of comedy Caroline Leddy told Dom to forget his plans of creating yet another political satire and instead instructed him to “just do something funny”. 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 came to see me once when I was in a goth band, and she looked like she’d put on weight. But then she showed me she’d tied four pillows around her body because she thought the sound from the stage was going to crack 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.
He and Stacey will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary this year and are hoping to visit their “happy place” in Muskoka, north of Toronto in Canada. “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.”
*Join Dom and Sam for their four-date tour of Trigger Happy TV – Live!, starting on October 7. Tickets go on sale from Friday (February 28) at 10am on Ticketmaster.
