Jason Manford interview

Jason Manford has a new DVD out. We gave him a call to find out why people are soiling themselves watching it, and the plans for his chain of comedy clubs...

Hi Jason. You're on a train heading to London right now? Given you work a lot on TV, is living in Manchester a strain in that respect?

Yeah, just on my way down now. It's got pluses and minuses really.

It's good, because it's obviously where my family live and where the kids are happy at school. It's also great for touring, because you sort of are in the middle of the country, so only really three hours from anywhere; and it's cheaper to live up here.

A lot of things are filmed in London, but with MediaCity and stuff in Salford now, more is being filmed here too.

Moving on to talk about your new DVD, First World Problems. It's a great theme, perhaps surprising therefore it'd not been done before...

Yeah, it's an easy hook. As a comic you're essentially moaning about everyday problems anyway and trying to turn them into funny stories, so it sort of seems like a nice easy sell.

It's only a small section of the DVD though - maybe 20 minutes of the show - but people really got behind it. The audience write down problems every night, so I've probably read thousands of first world problems now. With stand-up you're trying to make that night feel like it's special. Making it something that didn't happen last night and won't happen tomorrow - that's the trick. Having little devices, like the first world problems, is a good way of doing that.

I shepherded the audience towards things about their town that bothered them, because you get big laughs for things which, for you, are not even jokes. For example, I'd read out "Oh the lights on Shepherdess Walk are a nightmare" and the whole audience is like "oh, yeahhhh!". I would never be able to come up with that observation myself of course.

You extensively toured this year. Did you find the non-improvised material started to get boring to you after, say, the 80th show?

I always write more than I need and act like a football manager - some of the gags are left on the bench for a few weeks, having a bit of a rest.

But, no, I think if you get bored of your own voice then stand-up isn't for you. There's a way of changing your perception, so you get excited because the reaction is new and different. Although you've told your funny story 100 times, you can't wait to tell a new person this funny story still.

So, no, I don't think boredom ever creeps in, because the audience haven't heard it yet and I know they're going to like it, so it's still exciting each night.

We think it's great you champion the idea that people should head to their local stand-up club and take a chance on comedians they may not have heard of. Your own chain of clubs seems to be going from strength-to-strength...

I love doing it. It'd be nice if it made some money, ha ha. No, it's very much for the love of it. It breaks even, that's enough for me.

I don't do it as a business venture, it's just exciting to be at the forefront of seeing comics come through, and comics who have always been brilliant - Ben Norris and Dave Johns, Mick Ferry and Andy Askins, brilliant brilliant comics who, just for whatever ever reason, haven't quite had the successes that their talent deserves.

It's also about being there to see new people coming through, where you think 'oh my god, this person is unbelievable'. We've seen loads of people come through, even from open spot level... Sofie Hagen and Jonny Awsum; brilliant comics who have definitely got big things ahead for them.

There's such a wide range of talent out there. As I've said previously, and said on the Manfords Comedy Clubs website, there's comics out there who are playing the circuit 6 or 7 nights a week who are, for 20 minutes, as good as anybody in the world. They're as good as Lee Evans, as Michael McIntyre, John Bishop, Sarah Millican, whoever. I'm not saying they could sustain it for 2 hours, but nobody is asking them to, and no one is asking you to as an audience... but, for a tenner, to come and watch four comics that match fit I just think, to me, it's a no-brainer?

It's still a hard sell to say to people, 'look, I promise you these people are just as funny as anyone you've seen on the telly, it's worth the gamble - it's only £2.50 a comic'. It's still hard to get it through to people, but hopefully having my name attached to it helps. But, also, the proof is in the pudding: people are actually coming down, having a great night and coming back.

There's a few of the clubs now which are really flying. Birmingham regularly gets 150 to 200 people every week, and some of our other ones are over 150 seats and they're full every month. But then there are other ones - like we've got one in Wimbledon - that take a bit more work.

You can only get them through the door using your name once... once they're through the door, it's up to the comics on stage to prove my point.

Do you think you can keep expanding the chain?

We've signed a deal with Park Resorts, who do holiday camps, so we're doing shows for them next year. It seems like we've stepped back into the 70s a little bit, by sticking comedy clubs in holiday parks, but summer is always a quiet time for comics and comedy clubs, and I'm trying to work out how we could still work during the summer, and this seems like an easy sell really.

Then, we'll see. We're monitoring the Jongleurs situation to see what happens with them. They've got a lot of debts they need to pay off, a lot of comics they've not paid and things like that...

But I think there's a real gap in the market [for more Manford's clubs]. You've got your top class comedy clubs - your Comedy Stores, Glee Clubs and Stands - clubs that are nailing it week in, week out... and, after that, there's the odd independent club that runs really well, but there's not really something across the country like Jongleurs were in their heyday - clubs doing top class comedy every week for an affordable price, treating the comics well, respecting the audience, and not charging the world.

For me, I'm coming at it from the best point of view I think. Even if I had a 100 clubs, all doing very well, they could never make as much money as I can make from my own tour and TV things, so in a way it's the best way to start a business, because at no point am I thinking 'I need to make money out of this'. The first 6 months of any club is about 'are we going to breakeven?', and I'm not thinking 'how can I squeeze every last penny out of this', because it's not about that for me.

Great stuff. We like following your Facebook profile Jason. It must take up a fair bit of your time to keep on top of that?

I just do it if I'm sat on a train for two hours, in the back of a car on the way to a gig, or in a hotel room bored, or whatever. It never takes up my personal time, it only ever takes up the time I'd be watching telly or doing nothing anyway, so in that respect, it's good.

This tour was essentially written off the back of jokes I did on Facebook. There's a thing called Archivedbook which you can look at all the posts you've ever written... there was about 400,000 of them!

I spent about two months in a cafe just going through all these jokes I'd written, or observations about the kids or whatever, news stories I'd posted, and I could see from the likes and views and comments which the most popular were. So it was a really useful tool in that respect.

It [social media] is also a great tool for also getting things out there. Now I know what sort of works too. If you just do a plug for something - 'my DVD is out now' - it'll get 30 or 40 responses and I'll probably get a few thousand likes, and that's it. If I put a clip, that gets a little bit more, because people like the visual thing... but by far the biggest thing which gets the most shares and comments is just simply to misspell something. If you can do it in a humourous auto-correct fashion, all the better.

'DVD' on the iPhone changes to 'Dad', so I put 'My dad is released today' which I knew would get loads of people going 'ha ha ha'; and on Twitter I put 'spending the afternoon plugging my dad'... that got thousands of comments and likes. People love to correct you!

There's a bit of fun happening on your Amazon listing too...

Yeah, that's all worked out quite well. I've got a gag in the show about my daughter saying she had so much to do, she had pooed herself. I asked her 'why did you do it?', and she said 'I was having so much fun I forgot'. I do a routine about how that would never happen to us, and then at the end of the shows I've been asking the audiences to go online and just review my DVD. And they've been putting stuff like "I've been having so much fun. We shit ourselves." There's like 200 comments now that just say the same kind of thing. The people at Amazon must be thinking 'what on earth is happening at these shows'!

Jason Manford Live Tour 2014 First World Problems is out now on DVD and Blu-ray. Shop