Once more for Lock...

6:28am Thursday 21st February 2008

Looking at Sean Lock's itinerary for his forthcoming tour, I noticed that after the show in Galway there are two weeks before the next one in Birmingham.

From this, I erroneously concluded that the Irish Republic might have been his birthplace. It wasn't. However, his mother was from Northern Ireland and he used to have a lot of cousins in Bradford.

"They moved back to Northern Ireland years ago. I was last in Bradford about a year ago for the 50th wedding anniversary of an uncle. They came over from Northern Ireland to the church where they were married. I last played St George's Hall on the Newman and Baddiel tour in 1993," he said.

The winner of the Time Out Award for Comedy and the British Comedy Award Winner for Best Stand-Up was born in Surrey on April 22, 1963. He started out on the stand-up comedy circuit in 1989 when people such as Paul Merton, Eddie Izzard and Frank Skinner were trying out new ways of being funny.

"I was a labourer on building sites. I specialised in pre-cast panels and beams on large buildings. I travelled a lot, bummed around Europe to escape miserable Thatcher's Britain in the Eighties.

"I got into comedy completely by luck. I do appreciate that, it wasn't a hidden thing. I just used to do open nights in pub comedy spots in East London where I lived. It was great fun in those days, no one took you seriously. I was surprised you could make a living out of it.

"It cantered along quite nicely and then people started taking it seriously, people like Jack Dee. I thought, hello, what meeting were they attending that I didn't know about?' But I haven't done the comedy circuit now for eight or nine years."

Does he take any notice of the competition? "It's the new Rock 'n' Roll. Once upon a time everybody wanted to be a cowboy. Now a lot more young people want to do stand up.

"You just have to concentrate on what you do. It's a fool's mission to worry what other people are doing," he added.

Since the mid-1990s Sean Lock has established a reputation as a television performer and writer with series such as 15 Storeys High for BBC3, TV Heaven and Telly Hell for Channel 4, Have I Got News For You, QI and Live at the Apollo, all for the BBC.

One of the purposes of this tour, which starts on March 20 at St George's Hall, Bradford, is the show at London's Apollo, Hammersmith in May, which will be filmed for DVD release later in the year.

It's a resumption of the 50-date tour he did last autumn and will be broadly the same two-hour show but with some additions.

I asked him to give me a snapshot of his life on the road.

"I tour alone. I am quite low maintenance. Bill Bailey, my friend, has eight or nine lorries on his stadium tour. I turn up with a hold-all. Sometimes I get a driver. I don't have a support.

"People pay to see me so I would rather do the show. I will probably do the Bradford, Carlisle, Glasgow part of the tour by train. It's a green tour," he said, tongue-in-cheek.

"We're quite lazy people. Stand-up attracts nocturnal people, people who don't like getting up in the morning. I am writing a film script at the moment about stand-ups," he said.

Alternative comedy was the hallmark of the new wave of stand up comedians inspired by acts like The Wow Show with Steve Frost. Comedians of the old school objected that traditional jokes about mothers-in-law and Irishmen, Englishmen and Scotsmen were frowned upon.

"There were just different ways to be funny other than to tell mother-in-law jokes at working men's clubs, you know, by comedians in velvet jackets. I didn't want to do mother-in-law jokes because I wasn't living with one."

When young comedians ask for advice Sean tells them two things:- "First, do loads of gigs. Second, make sure that what you're doing is what you think is funny. It's easy to make an audience laugh accidentally"

But then one day they might stop laughing accidentally and you won't know why.

As the young Bob Dylan said in A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, you'd better know your song well before you start singing.

• Sean Lock is at St George's Hall on March 20. The box office number is (01274) 432000. He is at Leeds City Varieties on April 29, box office 08456 441881, and Halifax's Victoria Theatre on May 3, box office (01422) 351158.
  
  

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