Circuit Training 74: Station to Station with James Acaster

Don't take too much notice of the David Bowie reference in the heading there - it's just that James Acaster was loitering at Kings Cross station during our chat. Now phoners can be a bit impersonal but, honestly, this was so much more eventful than us meeting at some cafe somewhere - another comic made an unwitting cameo, Acaster heroically aided a passer-by, and there's a dramatic on-train denouement. Well, relatively speaking.

This proud native of Kettering was en route to a gig up north, as he's currently touring a widely-praised Edinburgh show, Recognise - not that he's a great fan of reviews or, indeed, reviewers, it turns out, even if they are widely praising him. Elsewhere in our chat we get pretty geeky about stand-up, TV traumas, and how embracing your own lack of cool is the way forward. So, no, he's not Ziggy Stardust, but the interview does begin with a mild bit of celeb-spotting...

Where are you heading off to, James?

I'm going to Harrogate, doing a tour show... Ha! I've just seen Tony Law walking across Kings Cross, with his suitcase, looking extremely lost and confused.

Is he in relatively normal attire?

Yeah, brown jacket and jeans and a stripy sort of sailor shirt - his wife has now run up to him and is explaining to him how the trains work. It's always funny to see Tony when he can't see you.

So what about you - how do you choose where to go on these tours?

I like to go back to places that were good last time, even if they didn't sell as much. Like Southend. Last time I had 50 people, one of the lowest sellers on the tour but one of the most fun gigs. I went back there this year and we got 60 - again quite low, but it's one of the better gigs so far. So you go to places that are fun, or that sell well, and everywhere else you do a bit of a cull.

Last year's tour show, if I'm honest, by that point I'd gone off the show a bit - 'I'm not actually sure this is me at my best.' But this year's show I'm delighted with, really proud of it.

Has your style evolved much since you started out?

It always evolves. You've got to start off with yourself, which is quite hard to do at the beginning, your instincts are to try to do what you've seen other people do.

My big breakthrough as an open-mic was realising that I wasn't cool, and I think until that point in my life I'd been lying to myself, 'oh, I'm a pretty cool guy' then realising on stage that it was absolutely not how I was being viewed by the audience. So it's letting go of that.

You did your first Mock The Week recently - how did you find it?

I honestly had a brilliant time, it was the most relaxed I'd felt on a panel show. I was on with some friends as well, Josh (Widdicombe) and Sara (Pascoe), so I found it easy to improvise with them, and all the other people on the show were really welcoming and accommodating.

We've all heard different things in the past about it, but, like that last round, where you're all standing round the mic - Andy Parsons was standing opposite me, and if he saw me try and go for it and I didn't get to the mic, he'd hang back and make sure I got there next time. I found the whole thing quite nice and welcoming.

I wonder if the atmosphere has changed, as the personnel have changed...

Maybe. I think they're all aware of the reputation it had, definitely, so I think they've taken that and gone 'right', and made people feel quite welcome. I think they appreciate that you've got to keep introducing new people to the show, and the only way that the show is going to do well is if they do well.

I tend to think the mood changed when Milton Jones started appearing.

I think that was quite big. I wasn't watching it regularly then, but I was on tour with him when he went on it for the first time, and we went from doing 300-seaters to 1000-seaters within a couple of months - he definitely did show 'you can just do this', but I believe that with comedy in general anyway. A lot of it, there's maybe too much... Oops, you dropped your magazine! Sorry, was just trying to help someone there.

Very public-spirited of you!

Anyway, yeah, often TV will try to turn comedians into something they're not. A comedian will do well in Edinburgh and the TV people will go 'great, come in for a meeting', and then they go 'can you do this?' and you say 'that sounds like something that would suit Chris Ramsey.' 'Yeah, but could you do it though?' 'Why?' 'Well, you've just had a good Edinburgh', 'Yeah, but Chris Ramsey had a good Edinburgh by being Chris Ramsey, why don't you talk to him? He could do this really well.' I think too much of the time they just don't trust the funny comedian.

But Milton, he's been going for 20 years, you put him in anything and he'll be funny. Mock The Week, you might think 'oh he's the last person you'd expect to work there', but actually, as long as he doesn't try to fit in with it, it works really well.

Is your Radio 4 show happening - James Acaster's Findings?

Yeah that's going out, I think, next month - I haven't really been told. They've sent me the rough edits and I've sent them notes back on it. The pilot was a long time ago, then we recorded the series, but that got put back quite a few times. These things take so long.

Have you had people sympathising: 'oh, shame your pilot wasn't picked up'

No, no-one cares, they're all too focused on their own stuff.

I haven't seen Recognise yet, but I did see you try out a fabulous Torvill and Dean bit at Old Rope a while back - did that make it in?

Ah, thank you - yeah, that's the start of the show pretty much.

How did the overall idea for Recognise come about?

I was watching 21 Jump Street, and thought 'that'd be funny, pretending that I'm an undercover cop for the whole show', the audience couldn't prove that I wasn't. Then the more I wrote, the more it was going to be about me getting over my ex-girlfriend, so that made it easier and more fun to write.

Is the tour show the same as the Edinburgh show?

It's longer. I've added bits from previous shows that I think fit in better with this one. Also some bits that I've improvised on tour that have stayed in.

I'm increasingly traumatised that so many good shows disappear after the live run finishes, apart from the few that wind up on DVD - are your old shows knocking around somewhere?

You always have them on hand. When I went to Melbourne recently I basically did a best of, and that was fun, going through all the old shows and thinking 'I'd do that bit again, I can link that routine from the second show to that one from the first show,' and you suddenly come up with new callbacks.

It's like doing a mixtape of your own material...

Yeah, it's nice to feel like you're showcasing a whole bunch of different stuff. And there's not a bit in that show that I think 'oh, that's not that funny.'

On the other hand, there's nothing worse than seeing a comic who's jaded by his old material.

You always enjoy it if the audience are enjoying it, but if you're feeling quite tired - like, at the minute I'm quite ill, and if I go out tonight in Harrogate to an audience that aren't really trying, it's gonna be really hard for me to sell this show to them. But if they're up for it, I can give them a good one.

I've seen you described in a few reviews as 'low octane.' Do you know what it even means?

No, no, I've never used it to describe myself. It is low energy, fair enough, not low octane. It's very interesting, I got a review quite early on in Edinburgh this year in the Telegraph, and for the rest of the month there weren't many reviews that didn't use this one quote, word for word what he said. So 'low octane' is another one of those things.

You've had some great reviews for this show - do you take much notice of them?

No, it never helps. In Edinburgh when your ego is fragile, it's nice to get a good review to pick you up a little bit, but very few of them really get it right. The amount of reviews that don't mention someone being funny, no matter how good the review is: at no point does the reviewer say how hilarious, funny, laugh-out-loud it was. Because actually they're not reviewing you on that anymore, on how much everyone's laughing, they're reviewing how clever it is.

So often the audience that's attracted from the review is an audience wanting to see how clever the show is. They're sat in near silence with their hands on their chins nodding to each other, then they walk out and you go, oh, that's not why I wrote this show. I wrote it to be funny, and actually a lot of it is meant to be stupid.

Even good reviews can be negative, then?

Reviews are fine, a means to an end, they serve some sort of purpose. But I know a lot of comics who'll say 'such and such [a person] gave me this review, I'm thinking I should probably change that.' And I'm just like 'nope, that bit in your show is really great, and that person is a reviewer who doesn't do stand-up, at the end of the day.'

It's lovely that they like to go and watch shows - or maybe they don't like to go and watch shows, let's face it. It's nice that they sat and had an opinion. I disagree with that opinion. Every now and then a comic that everyone thinks is a bit rubbish will get a bad review, and other comics will go [nerdy voice] 'read this, it's really funny how bad it is.' And then you read it but don't get any pleasure out of it because you think 'no, it's written just as badly as the show sounds,' by some bitter person who doesn't like comedy any more...

Oh no! Someone's sitting in my reserved seat, I'd better go and turf them out - I'm on the train now, the vestibule, the bit between the carriages.

Ah, I thought the 'reserved seat' thing was another dig at the critics. Actually, this behind-the-scenes insight reminds me of your YouTube series...

Sweet Home Ketteringa

Indeed - are more of them planned?

Yeah, we did the Kettering Museum, and my old secondary school, although it's not even there any more, they've knocked it down and built an astroturf football pitch over the top of it. And there's an academy there now, so I visited that. And we went to Boughton House the other day, which is called the Versailles of England. I went there with my mum on that episode. The storyline of the series is that we fired the sound op. So I replace her with my mum.

For details of James Acaster's live shows, radio shows and mum-based internet show, visit www.jamesacaster.com