Circuit Training 67: Marcus Brigstocke's Achilles Heel

The last 12 months have been distinctly up and down for Marcus Brigstocke, the fine comic and fervent winter sports enthusiast; a bewildering downhill-slalom of peaks and crashes. Not only has his private life been dragged through the tabloids (due to a high-profile change of partner), but he's also managed to snap a couple of key bits of his anatomy along the way, both in very public places.

Still, you get the impression that he's emerged from these setbacks more determined than ever to raise big laughs and big questions, in roughly equal measure. There are plans for several intriguing, cerebral and satirical new TV ventures, and an important political campaign in the offing - although the latter has taken a major twist in the few days since we did this interview, as you'll see below.

But first Brigstocke will bring his self-lacerating and somewhat hazardous stand-up show Je M'Accuse to the Soho Theatre, from 12th May. Possibly with a sizeable St John's Ambulance presence stationed nearby.

How are your various injuries now?

Oh God almighty mate, shocking. I've had surgery for a snapped cruciate ligament, snapped my Achilles tendon in Edinburgh, then - like the trooper I am - did 60 shows in 24 days, all but two of which were performed on or near crutches.

I've only just realised that I was nearby when you did that injury, in the queue for Adam Buxton's show that was due on afterwards, wondering why it was delayed...

The night it happened was the second show in Edinburgh, and during the spectacular ending I leapt in the air and there was an audible bang as my Achilles snapped - the audience thought it was hilarious. So yeah, that was six weeks on crutches. Then I did this winter sports programme, The Jump, for Channel 4, and I worked really hard to get my left leg back up to strength, and I think I did.

Having seen you on crutches in Edinburgh I was surprised to see you in it...

The medic wouldn't sign me off for The Jump because of the Achilles rupture. I love my winter sports, I'm passionate about them, so it was the gig of a lifetime from my point of view, being trained by Olympians and world champions to do stuff I'd always loved. So I trained for it, and with a few weeks to go the doctor scanned my leg and went 'well there's no way you can do this, no chance.'

So I did tons of physio, 10 different scans, and eventually they signed me off, and it was fine, I made it all the way to final then injured the same leg but in a totally different place, snapped my cruciate ligament. So I'm now back on crutches.

It was an odd show that - slightly slapdash but oddly gripping in places.

It was a strange mix, I think some of the sensibility of your standard celeb-based reality show was brought to bear to try and make it familiar to an audience. But my feeling is that the sport, and how hard we were trying, it was right out there - and god it was frightening. It really was. If you see some of the other celeb reality shows they're all a bit twinkly and sparkly, or it's just people being filmed being bored. So when I had the meeting with them I said 'are you filming in the hotel, and is there an audience vote?' and the answer to both those questions was 'no', so I thought great, I'm all over it.

It wasn't quite working until the girl refused to do the big end-of-show ski jump. I forget her name now...

Amy Childs

That's it - that was really quite dramatic, and brought home how nerve-wracking it must have been.

I'm glad you say that, because the jump, even that small one, is the most frightening thing I've ever done, I promise you, by miles. But I also knew, as I went off [the ramp], 'this isn't going to look like much on TV', which is a real shame, because even to stand up and slide off the end of that small one took real concentration, real nerve and all that shit.

And an interesting thing too, it was quite a humbling experience for me because I looked at the list of people and thought 'oh Christ, here we go'. Then I got there and met them all and realised that you need to be careful how you judge the choices people make and the things that people end up doing.

Because Amy Childs, for example, she's really savvy. I spoke to Amy on the second day and I'd never seen TOWIE or anything like that, and she knew and understood that, she was pretty switched on. I'm really glad that I had a chance to be exposed to a bit of that - it's too easy, especially in comedy, to go 'look at these know-nothings'.

You've been in the tabloids yourself recently - that must have been an eye-opener?

It was deeply unpleasant. I don't read anything about myself and haven't for a long time, but when family are involved, then you're inclined to. And again it's a humbling experience, and you think 'Christ almighty, here I am in, whatever, the Mail on Sunday,' and then over the following days there are stories appearing in the newspapers that can't even be bothered to do what scant journalism the Mail on Sunday did, that just repeat the same story.

And you think 'fucking hell, imagine being properly famous, imagine being a Hugh Grant or a Steve Coogan, or a Sienna Miller, where you've got them camped outside your house'. I honestly don't think I would cope. I picture myself turning irrational and violent and god knows what else.

I suppose that's when you get the gated mansion...

I suppose so, but what a life. So it was unpleasant for me, but sort of inevitable, but what was worse, there was a review in the Telegraph by Dominic Cavendish of my radio series, which was perfectly legit, because my politics are out there, everybody knows what I think, I don't hold back so everyone who disagrees shouldn't hold back either and are more than entitled to express an opinion - I thought he used it to grind his axe against the BBC but so be it.

But I was then made aware that the comments pages were discussing my children and my ex-wife. Jesus Christ - I ended up writing to the Telegraph saying, look, you're publishing these things, publish what you want about me, have a thousand people saying 'he's a cunt', but mention my children, or anyone else on a personal level, that's a red line.

As someone once said - never read the bottom half of the internet.

Yes, exactly!

You attack yourself in your current show, J'em Accuse

That was the Edinburgh show from last year, which I would have toured sooner but - forgive me tooting my own horn - that previous show [The Brig Society] was so good, and I was pretty proud of it, so that extended on. It was difficult, it dealt with austerity politics in a really thorough and extremely funny way, although it was not fun to write at all, it was fucking miserable, but when it got good I thought 'you know what, I'm gonna do this everywhere because I think this is a great show.'

I wrote J'em Accuse as a kind of... I needed to write that one. I spend a lot of time ranting and raving, blaming people for their failings, and to some extent this show is me going 'I'm an idiot.'

So you can refer back to it when required - 'look, I slag myself off too'?

Yeah, hopefully. Then the back half of the show is a proper, personal story and concerns the period in my late teens when I had very extreme, very early addiction problems: I was 24 stone when I was 17, and I was much shorter. I've always avoided that [on stage] because I never wanted to be the go-to guy for eating disorders, but I'm a better comedian now, I can talk about that stuff without it being a big indulgence. So it goes from there to me being a Goth to me working on an oil rig - and as a part-time podium dancer.

Are you going to include the Edinburgh injury story now too? Seems a shame to waste it.

Well, the thing is I can't include it without ruining the ending, but I suspect when I tour the show in the autumn - September 'til Christmas - the show will be twice the length then, so there'll be room.

All that touring doesn't leave much time for TV stuff...

There's not a lot going on telly wise for me at the moment. Deep down you always think 'I'll be fine, I'll always be wanted,' but on the surface, if you're sensible, you'll know that TV comedy will welcome in new people who are very funny, and very sexy. And up the other end, you'll not be spat out as such, but the regularity with which the phone will ring will diminish. Which is weird and a bit difficult to deal with [Marcus goes a bit quiet and wistful at this point]. Yeah, it is...

It goes in cycles though, comics come in and out of fashion

It absolutely does, and it depends what you're willing to do. I did a new show in Edinburgh last year called Unavailable for Comment, which I'm developing for TV, with the guy who produced the first TV series I ever did, We Are History. So we're developing that, but the closing of BBC Three - where I've never worked - means that what was a small pool that we're all trying to dive into has just got much, much smaller, and there's a lot of people in the BBC Three end of the pool now swimming all over the lanes that we thought belonged to us.

I really hope that the BBC, when they talk about moving that content online, mean what they say and have the knowhow to pull it off, because that is what should be happening. If you look at the amount of the comedy content that people watch online, that is where those sort of shows should be going - and it surprises me that there isn't a coherent, telly-like programme that appears on the internet every week.

Talking of sexy comics, you tried to become the UK version of the coolest man in the world, Jon Stewart, with your UK version of The Daily Show, The Late Edition. I always thought that was pretty brave.

I have not given up on that ambition. With all the other things I do, I would give everything up, everything, to make The Daily Show. And those producers out there who know me and know telly, most of them know that. And if anybody ever felt that that's what they wanted to do, I'd like to think, without tooting my horn, that I would be on a relatively short list of people who'd be considered for that job. We should be making The Daily Show in the UK. I don't understand while we're not. I find it extraordinary.

When I interviewed Andre Vincent a while back, who you worked with on The Late Edition, he admitted having reservations about it being presented by someone posh ['you can't be a voice of the people when it looks like you were brought up by a nanny,' as he put it]

If there's a liberal media elite represented by university-educated posh white boys, I do fit pretty neatly into that category. And while I find that appalling, and it is the sort of thing I'd satirise if it wouldn't put me out of work, it is what I am. I'm fine with it. It's hard to find voices that represent a broad spectrum of opinion, I think it's a failure of modern media, and everybody becomes a bit self-parodying. I know I always have. I think everybody identifies his class in comedy.

But we really should make The Daily Show. I have a campaign that's just gathering momentum, which is [challenging the rule] that footage from the House of Commons and House of Lords is not allowed to be used outside of news - do you know this?

Is that right?

Yeah - if you think about it, Have I Got News For You, the best and longest-running satirical programme we've got, you've never seen any footage from the Commons, ever. Not once.

...and that show does bring politics into a lot of homes that wouldn't normally be interested.

That's right - the Commons, they debate on our behalf, paid for by us, in the Palace of Westminster, issues that will affect us, and we're not allowed to use the footage. So should Maria Miller [the under-fire culture secretary] stay in her job, I'm trying at the moment to secure a meeting with her to get that law changed.

It'll happen one of two ways, either I'll have a meeting with her, she'll take it to the Commons and they'll go 'yeah this is all a bit outdated and outrageous and we'll change it' - or she'll say 'no way, you're not having this', and I'll get everyone I know in media to throw their weight behind it and we'll get enough people to sign a petition and they'll have to debate it, and it'll be embarrassing for them to turn it down.

[As it happened, perhaps foreseeing the forthcoming Brigstocke-backed storm like Amy Childs staring down that ski jump, Miller resigned the next day]

But what's odd about it is how few politicians know that that's the case. I mentioned it to George Osborne's second in command - I can never remember his name, but a very smart guy - and I told him and he went 'are you serious? Oh my god that's outrageous' - it's an affront to democracy. Every politician I've ever mentioned it to, they always go 'oh yeah, yeah we should change that, God that's really bad.'

It probably needs politicians to get behind it too though. I think Tony Benn was quite instrumental in getting cameras in originally.

That's right, and the laws they passed around that were all about protecting them and their reputation. So I'd like to get that changed. I'll let you know. Its gathering momentum, I'm putting people in place so I know what I'm doing without just blundering in. Charlie Brooker and I have discussed it on several occasions, and Charlie feels quite strongly about it. It's very odd that we can't use any of that.

How about the audio?

No, nothing, it can only be used in the context of news reporting.

So what'll your next stand-up show be about? Can you look that far ahead?

No, it'll depend on what takes my fancy. I'm very interested in economics at the moment, I'm reading a lot of Tim Harford's stuff and meeting with him about a possible TV project, looking at the way we make decisions based on economics, sometimes consciously, very often unconsciously, we vote against our own economic best interests.

Economics uses words that we have no understanding of but just accept, like 'a billion' - you and I almost certainly do not know what a billion looks like, we've never seen a billion of anything, or been able within our field of vision to quantify that, 'oh that's a billion Lego bricks,' but it's used all the time 'oh yeah, they spent a billon on that' - it doesn't mean anything.

So exploring that would be interesting. One of the things that came out of The Brig Society, playing around with people's money and giving a physical demonstration of how the bankers led us into collapse, and what they've done with our money, was fascinating. So probably that.

Comedy is such an essential tool for explaining things like that.

What I love to do is take subjects that on the surface you think 'well that's not funny, clearly there's nothing entertaining about that' and then wrestle the bastard to the ground and kick it into the shape of a comedy show. That's really satisfying for me.

Marcus Brigstocke will be performing nightly at London's Soho Theatre from 12th May - 24th May. For further details and tickets visit www.sohotheatre.com