Circuit Training 155: The Mark Thomas Back-to-Comedy Project

He loves a challenge, does Mark Thomas. Having graduated from fiery stand-up to issue-tackling TV then a run of reportage-fuelled theatre shows, he recently made perhaps the toughest move of all - getting back on the circuit, after decades away. It's ok to call him a comedian again.

There are no high-concept shenanigans in the new tour show, Gaffa Tapes, just a still-vital near-veteran on a stage chewing the fat and sharing home truths while tearing the Tories a new one, and probably Labour, and almost certainly Nigel Farage (whose name he repurposed during 100 Minor Acts of Dissent 10 years ago: Farage now means 'the liquid found at the bottom of a bin'). And all done with such gusto that even fans of the folks getting righteously gubbed should marvel at it.

He's hardly mellowing, then, and this return to full-blown comedy is an interesting gear change, if not a full volte-face. Just last year Thomas went the whole theatrical hog in the show England and Son, co-created by the playwright Ed Edwards. Proper acting, proper dark, and probably not for everyone. We met in the cafe of Edinburgh's finest arts institution, Summerhall, a year on.

The last time I saw you, you were getting a standing ovation for England and Son, in the Summerhall Roundabout - what's happened since?

The thing for me, it was going back to the circuit, after all these years; going 'this has changed'. That was when we finished with England and Son, out in Australia, Adelaide for five weeks, which was fucking brilliant, we just had a hoot.

But that play wasn't a hoot. I came away thinking 'bloody hell, what's the take-home message there...?'

People still come up and say hello after, but yeah, there's an element of shit on the end of that stick.

I mean, the guy who that is based on, he's lovely, he came to see the show three times in Manchester. He bought his missus, his sponsor, and someone he's trying to get into NA [Narcotics Anonymous]. What's interesting is the show speaks really fucking profoundly to people with addiction.

Right - whereas I was looking from the middle-class Fringe audience perspective.

We've taken the show to prisons and it fucking flies. What's amazing, we're in Greenock Prison, in the art room, and afterwards everyone just pulls the chairs up, this bloke's going [gruff Scottish accent]: "I've been thinking about my father, about how my father wanted me to be hard, about how my son thinks that I want him to be hard. And I dinnae want him to be hard."

They're going 'yeah, right, right' - they're having a discussion about toxic masculinity without mentioning the words.

The only place we're performing it now is prisons, and it fucking explodes - it's brilliant, and all these discussions are happening off the back of it. So it doesn't matter that there's not a single-sentence take-home message. What matters is that people experience something that's emotional; show them a voice that they haven't fucking seen before.

I wondered if you'd do more acting afterwards, full-on theatre, but you've gone the other way...

Well, I was skint - that was the bottom line. We came out of it totally fucking skint. And it was 'I had to borrow money' skint, properly skint. It wasn't just, 'oh, I can't afford to go on holiday,' it was 'I have no money whatsoever - so I need to get on the circuit.'

We had a chat about your NHS show years ago, and I was going 'you need to put this on YouTube, so everyone can see it'. And you said 'I need to make a living!' I think we always assume these are creative decisions...

No, it was 'I've got no money!' So what I did, I got a massive great spreadsheet and booked in 100 dates in four months, start from scratch, and write an hour.

What's the biggest difference you've seen on the circuit then? Is it a lot more professional, career-oriented?

I think the big changes are, when I started it felt like a gang, there weren't many of us. The atmosphere on the circuit was far more collegiate, everyone was chipping in, trying to create stuff, we tried to find our way forward.

Now there's loads of people. And they're very good. The entry level is really good. The diversity is brilliant. You have far more people of colour, with disabilities, neurodiversity.

Mind you, I think in comedy now it's actually neurodiverse not to be neurodiverse.

I know, I actually haven't bothered getting a diagnosis, I just know. I want to buck the trend. I've found the way to keep people's attention is not to say you have attention deficit disorder.

The thing about it, you've got far more women, far more people of colour. You've got far more really radical gendered voices. And that's absolutely as it should be. And this is a part of a revolution in stand-up that's brilliant. These are all good things. The energy level is great.

How about the venues?

I've done gigs, starting at the bottom again, open spots. There's a gig in The Salisbury in Harringay, and the venue is in the same room as the pub kitchen, and there's a set of old 50s hospital screens in between. On stage, you're looking over at them preparing, they're clattering away - and actually, it's not a bad gig.

It's better than being in with the actual pub.

Yeah - then there are gigs where it's like in a horseshoe bar, and they just put the curtain at one end of it, and the manager is so disinterested in everything, doing their accounts - 'mate, come on!'

People go to me 'oh, you're preaching to the converted'. Are you fucking kidding? I did a gig in Bury on the day of the election, we had to have a vote in the audience as to whether covid actually fucking happened.

It's an interesting time to talk to you, just after the election.

This show is very much about the Tory rule, how much they mismanaged it. I mean, Johnson was just a fucking disgrace, and we should have been raging every day and fucking hounding them out. So when you suddenly get snap elections; 'right, okay, this is interesting' - because you want to write new stuff. The great thing about stand-up, it's got a certain ephemeral nature. The fact that it's gone tomorrow, a gag that worked yesterday isn't going to work today.

But you spent a long time in the 'theatre' section - was it really theatre, or more about not being comedy any more.

The thing was, I wanted to do stuff that was a bit different. So I wanted it to be narrative. I wanted it to have a sense of investigation and inquiry. I wanted it to have a sense of adventure. We kind of straddled theatre and stand-up in many ways.

The thing about theatre is, you very rarely see anything that's spectacular, and you very rarely see anything that's truly shit. The majority of the stuff that you see is ok, because there's a writer, there's a producer, there's a director, there's an actor, there's an agent, there's lighting... we've all got a vested interest in this being good.

Can you still afford to make shows like that then, in future?

What I do is find ways to fund it. We never ever have had any Arts Council stuff, it seems to me just a fucking pointless and futile waste of time. We'd find alternative methods. So when we did Bravo [Figaro], the Royal Opera House essentially paid for the first bit to be done, gave us the singers, gave us all of this stuff. And then when we got it up and running, it kind of struggled through.

When we did Cuckoo, we got trade unions and groups to put forward the money. We published our own playscripts and sold advertising space in it.

You did some stand-up gigs at the Fringe two years ago, and included some really nice stuff about music hall acts, little singalongs.

I love the communality of music hall, the fact that people would join in. And people forget this bit, when you go and see arena gigs, I always think, how on earth can you go and see an arena gig? What's the point of seeing the arena gig? But it's actually standing in a big place with everyone else, singing the same songs. So there's a communality of it, which is beautiful.

It's part of the community and experience and doing things together that stops us living in isolation. That's why church is still actually relatively powerful. You come together. You're a group of people. You're quite disparate in many ways. But each week, you do the ritual.

Comedy can be more divisive though, we've seen it up here, how certain subjects can cause a big row.

I did a gig in Chiswick, in my first 10 gigs back on the circuit. Nice gig. Chiswick's quite Tory, big plastic chandeliers hanging above, lovely room. I walk on, do my set, go 'I know Tories are in, I can smell ya' - all that, do the thing, get to the end, 'right, I'll tell a joke and get off', and a bloke goes 'you're boring mate'.

So I put him down and he goes, 'No, you're boring,' I'm putting him down again. And I said, 'mate, the laughter isn't with you.' I did more stuff, put him down, and the audience are completely onside. He keeps going. And eventually I lost my temper and said, 'mate, I've done this for 39 years, and I met people like you on day one, and you're always the same. You never change. You're over-entitled dullard cunts. That's what you fucking are. Here's a joke...'

And I told the joke at the end and then walked off. Anyway, I'm standing in the dressing room, a little bit like that [shaky], it's been quite a thing, and [union leader] Mick Lynch walks in, goes, 'you did him like a pro'. Ha!

You mentioned gender: that's an interesting one, how people who once seemed very liberal have ended up on the other side of it.

But that whole gender critical movement, there are bits that are going into the fucking far right. They haven't actually put forward a critique, there's this scattergun 'the wokerati!', and then it's very easy [for them] to go 'and the migrants, and...' Suddenly it's all snowballing, this massive ball of amorphous hate.

And actually, it's been very interesting for me, coming up and talking about it, because all the riots have kicked off. And part of me has been like, 'we should be down there organising'.

It is odd being in Edinburgh, cosseted away while all this is happening down south.

What I'm pleased with, people are now mobilising, because we need to have a fucking massive presence. Fascism, it's not something that you win, it's something you continually battle. So actually, the idea of some kind of Rock Against Racism or the Anti-Nazi League kicking off again, I'm like, game on, because we need to do this.

There's a lad I mentioned on stage last night. He was arrested, given two and a half years, he'd punched a police officer. He'd been shouting, 'Allah, Allah, Who the fuck is Allah?' They found a large stone in his pocket, and the judge refused to believe it was a 'healing stone' - you fucking cunt...

This new show then, is it evolving as it goes along, or pretty set?

It changes all the time, I hate having a set thing, and I love writing it on the go. So [during the Fringe] there's a whole section about Labour, there's a whole section about the riots and Farage, there's a whole section about how democracy actually is failing.

It's hardly shiny-floor stand-up then. What were your own formative experiences, watching live stuff?

When I started, audiences came along to see things they couldn't see on the telly. The first stand-up I saw was Tommy Trinder, but the first cabaret gig I went to was Jongleurs actually. There was a clown, Nick Revell was on, there was a low wire act, and an Irish squeezebox orchestra that all had 'free Bobby Sands' stickers on their accordions. So that was really exciting.

You had The Iceman - everyone mentions The Iceman, he was incredible. Poets like Attila the Stockbroker, John Hegley would come down to The [Comedy] Store. A whole range of street performers like The Vicious Boys or John Lenehan, performance artists, Phil Cornwell, who was just insane. I compered Phil once, when he when he was off his fucking chomp on speed, and he did his whole set in 11 minutes.

The first time I came across him was probably on Steve Wright In The Afternoon...

He used to do Gilbert the Alien! He asked [Wham spin-off singers] Pepsi & Shirlie halfway through an interview: 'What do you think of Bertrand Russell?' I adored that. There was that variety - Paper Tearer [Terri] Carol, who used to appear at the Hackney Empire. Chris Luby, he was fucking nuts.

At Malcolm Hardee's funeral everyone was standing round the coffin, reading letters and emails, just five or six people; very tender moment. Chris was managed by Malcolm. He gets in the pulpit. "Guys, I wasn't going to do this, but this one's for the big fella: Spitfire victory roll. Brrrrrrrrmmmmmm..."

I was thinking about Malcolm the other day. At one festival [acclaimed US actor/playwright] Eric Bogosian is on, there's all these little tents - Malcolm drives a tractor through his set halfway through, naked, fucking Bogosian's chasing him...

I miss the fucking madness of it, that element of variety and music hall.

Can you see why it's changed, over the years?

Yeah, because the thing about variety and music hall acts, you can only really do it once. Unless you're Tommy Cooper and you're a genius. But also, now you have comics with much more personal, political journeys. And comperes working the room, and they film it and want to put it out there, it changes the dynamic of the show.

So those are the big changes for me. There's not as much chaos.

Mark Thomas: Gaffa Tapes is touring the UK until the end of February 2025. Tour dates & tickets