Dom Joly

Audio - Dom Joly: There's a witch hunt against hoax DJs

Comedian Dom Joly talks about the Australian royal hoaxers.

The Australian radio hosts at the centre of the hoax call to the King Edward VII hospital - pretending to be members of the Royal Family asking after the Duchess of Cambridge - say they are "gutted and heartbroken" over the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha.

Mrs Saldanha was found dead on Friday, three days after taking the hoax call.

Her death has led many to ask where people involved in such programmes should draw the line.

Dom Joly, comedian and columnist in The Independent, was host of Trigger Happy TV - a Channel 4 series which played tricks on members of the public using hidden cameras.

"I do have sympathy with the DJs in the extent that there's been this sort of witch hunt against them online as though they intentionally did this with the view that the consequences were going to happen.

"When I do stuff I've got a rough judgement of who I'm doing things with.

"I draw the line on what makes me laugh and what doesn't. There are legal parameters anyway. I tend to have a traffic light system. When I start talking to someone, if there's something that doesn't feel right I walk away. I think it only works when you've got someone who's on a sort of equal footing."

Dom Joly: Hidden camera scares

When I turned up on set for my new ITV1 hidden camera series Fool Britannia, I thought someone was playing a joke on me. There were 25 crew waiting to get started, compared to the five of us who made Trigger Happy TV back in 2000. How can you secretly film people with 25 crew hanging about, I thought?

Interview: Dom Joly

With a new prime-time TV show and a book about his quest to find the world's legendary monsters, which included a visit to Loch Ness, there's just no hiding the talents of Dom Joly.

Dom Joly interview

Comic Dom Joly, 44, is reprising the format of his hidden-camera show Trigger Happy TV with Fool Britannia. Here he talks to Metro about how it's different to his previous shows, how he hunted the Ogopogo, Canada's Loch Ness Monster, and why he doesn't like Twitter.

So, last week the BBC broadcast The Revolution Will Be Televised and Channel 4 went with I'm Spazticus. Now ITV has hit back with its own hidden camera show, and brought in the genre's most famous name: Dom Joly.

However, Fool Britannia is a much tamer programme. It's being broadcast in a pre-watershed slot, for starters, in another attempt to make-up for the shortfall caused by the end of TV Burp. While it's a nice idea to try and make a more family-friendly prank show, the show appears to be suffering a bit in its slot.

You can tell that Fool Britannia goes out after You've Been Framed - and they share two key traits. A voice over, which for a prank show doesn't really work, and a laughter track. To make it worse, I happen to know that this is canned laughter. Genuine canned laughter, in this day and age! Shocking.

Admittedly, there are some genuine laughs to be gotten out of the show. My personal favourite was Joly's health and safety officer character Ian Yard trying to prevent coffee from being too hot by using a mini electric fan. It has some potential, but it needs to cast aside some of the more troublesome features of the programme.

Review: Doesn't compare favourably to Trigger Happy TV

Fool Britannia was broad, crass and very ITV. Has Dom Joly lost his funny bone?

Fool Britannia Review: A Joly Good Show? I Think Not...

The jokes were simple and immature in the worst sense, and I do wonder who would laugh at Dom Joly parking a New York City billboard in front of a man on a bench at Land's End.

Dom Joly nearly shot by the Mafia during filming

Prankster Dom Joly narrowly escaped being murdered by the Mafia while filming his new ITV1 show.

Dom Joly interview

He may be best-known for his hidden camera show, Trigger Happy TV, but Dom Joly is taking the genre to the next level with his new ITV1 prime-time entertainment series.

There's no getting around the fact that this is a monumental feast of backslapping: a two-hour, self-loving parade where Channel 4 tells itself just how wonderful and influential it is. Which is pretty insufferable if you think about it. Luckily for Channel 4, it does have a lot to cheer about.

This was the channel, after all, that gave us Green Wing and Spaced, Peep Show, Brass Eye and Father Ted. And we should be forever grateful to C4 for giving Harry Hill his TV debut with The Harry Hill Show (1997-99), which figures in the foothills of the top 30, voted for by members of the public.

Elsewhere Dom Joly, from Trigger Happy TV, bemoans the albatross of the giant mobile phone gags, where he yelled "HELLO!" into a fake mobile ("I really hate it [now]. I hate it with a passion uncontested. It's my Emu"), and Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer reveal they filmed their Big Night Out 20 minutes after leaving the pub.