Dom Joly: Why travel helps TV star keep his finger on the trigger

He knew he’d become famous the day he caught the train.

Dom Joly was sitting in a train carriage in January 2000, carefully minding his own business. He heard that Nokia mobile phone ring. The owner answered the call, and three passengers bellowed: “Hello. What. No. Can’t Hear You. I’m On The Train!!” The second episode of Trigger Happy TV had just aired the night before and the big mobile character had clearly entered the national consciousness. Nobody realised Joly was on board, but he realised that his life had changed.

Joly’s Channel 4 show was must-see Friday-night telly. Sandwiched between Friends and Frasier, Joly had caught the slipstream of Cool Britannia and propelled himself to stardom as one of Britain’s funniest and most clever entertainers.

The former ITN political reporter and diplomat (“I did my serious jobs first”) had created Trigger Happy TV with his mate, Sam Cadman. Together, they made 12 episodes and two Christmas specials. The shows had been all killer and no filler: They were built on clever, time-consuming editing; original ideas and a perfect marriage of cool tunes and funny sketches executed with precision and finesse. Joly, in the words of Victor Lewis-Smith, the TV reviewer for the Evening Standard, had “turned the humble practical joke into an art-form.”

And then – like John Cleese and Fawlty Towers or Ricky Gervais and The Office – Trigger Happy TV’s maker called it a day. He’d captured the zeitgeist, created a phenomenon, his show was sold to more than 80 countries worldwide, with America making its own version. He hosted his own BBC chat show, invited The Cure’s Robert Smith to his wedding, bought a big house in the country and started writing about travel for The Sunday Times and The Independent on Sunday. Ahh. Isn’t life sweet.

“Trigger Happy TV was a bit like punk, suddenly we could buy a camera that allowed us to not rely on professional crews. We just filmed and filmed and filmed. There was no filler. We just filmed until we had nothing but gold. I spent months in the edit, putting it together. Sometimes I’d extend the joke because I didn’t want the music to end...the music was such a big part of it for me. But there was no master-plan, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what it would become. I was just doing something I enjoyed. It was instinct.

“That moment on the train when people started shouting hello was incredible. I realised then I’d done something. But it was like a whirlwind, a terrifying, exhilarating, destructive whirlwind.”

His favourite clip of all time was for his BBC1 show - World Shut Your Mouth. In it he played a hapless British stunt man standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon with a seven-foot rocket strapped to his back asking nervous Americans to light the fuse.

At one stage, he persuaded the BBC to fly him to all Seven Wonders of The World in one trip for a single joke.

Burnt out from comedy he started focusing on travel. He got a job writing for the Sunday Times and made a cult travel show for Sky called “Dom Joly’s Happy Hour” which has influenced so many recent “celeb” travel shows.

“I’ve always loved travel shows. But even though everybody knows how TV works, travel shows always lie. They always show Michael Palin racing for a train because if he misses it then the whole trip is doomed. He makes it and you see a beautiful shot of the train leaving the station…who is filming that? So, I always wanted to make interesting travel shows that incorporated comedy and addressed the essential idiocy of travel show grammar.”

Then he started writing travel books…his real passion. He wrote the best-selling travel book The Dark Tourist. He visited the killing fields of Cambodia and ended up in a war crimes trial. He went to Chernobyl before it was fashionable. He went on a coach tour of North Korea. He road-tripped though Syria. He went skiing in Iran. For his next book – Scary Monsters and Super Creeps – he hunted monsters in The Congo, the Himalayas, Japan, Canada, America…Dom has lead a varied life…

“North Korea is still the weirdest place I’ve ever been too. It’s insane. The only people who go to North Korea are hardened travellers whose idea of hell is a coach tour – it’s like somebody has taken all the colours out of the palette. The whole country reminded me of the final scene in a Bond movie at the baddies’ lair.

They have a massive bunker to stash the presents given to North Korea by other world leaders. So, they have a train from Stalin, a stuffed alligator holding drinks from the PLO, a little plate from the NUM in Derby. It’s insane.”

Joly added to his list of unusual travel by undertaking an assassination vacation in the USA, visiting the sites made unintentionally famous by JFK, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King and more. With hit book after hit book, widely-read column after insightful travelogue, Joly became the UK’s answer to the brilliant American writer P J O’Rourke.

His most recent book, The Hezbollah Hiking Club, followed a boozy, cricket-filled afternoon at Lord’s, where Joly convinced his two closest friends to agree to the unthinkable: a challenging hike across Lebanon, from the Israeli border in the south, along the spine of the country’s mountain range, all the way to the Syrian border in the north. For Joly it was something of a homecoming, having grown up in Beirut.

And now it’s time to share those tales. From outlandish international stunts for his TV comedy to curious travel snaps from his travels; Joly will be sharing uncensored travel tales from the dark side in Dom Joly’s Holiday Snaps, which is visiting 51 theatres and arts centres between February and April.

“I’ve just got this extensive collection of weird holiday snaps. And I know there’s that cliché that ‘nobody wants to see anybody else’s holiday photos’. Well, mine are really good. And I’ve got some really good stories with them. I’m also going to show some comedy clips I filmed when travelling.

“For instance, when we did Trigger Happy TV, we went to Switzerland and I got arrested for impersonating a yeti. Then there was stuff from World Shut Your Mouth, which had me frightening an Eskimo. There’s footage of me at Chernobyl, thinking ‘should I eat the vegetables here or not?’ So, when I put all of them together, I’ve got a seriously great holiday show.”

He has indeed. Mixing the best of his comedy with unique stories from his much-loved columns and travel books, Joly will entertain fans with holiday snaps, videos and stories before meeting them after the show to sign copies of his latest book. He’s hoping to dig out his old school photo for the tour too. “I found out not so long ago that I went to school with Osama bin Laden. I messaged for him on Friends Reunited, but he didn’t get back to me.”

Dom Joly is best known as the creator of Trigger Happy TV. And now the writer and broadcaster is undertaking his first UK tour since 2011, giving fans a rare opportunity to see him live. Dom will be talking about his exploits as a serial globe-trotter and seeker of dangerous travel spots. From North Korea to the Congo and Syria to Chernobyl, he’s visited some of the most unusual places on the planet. Joly famously attended school with Osama Bin Laden and armed with a trusty Powerpoint, fans can expect his holiday snaps to provide comedy and a sense of danger. The best-selling author will meet fans after the show to sign copies of his latest book, The Hezbollah Hiking Club.

We’ve got ten minutes left. There’s no better way to spend it than asking about some of his favourite things.

• Favourite album: “That changes every day, but it would probably be David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I just think that it was the first time I stopped listening to my sister’s albums and listening to my own. Bowie did something to me that was unlike anything that had ever happened before. The first thing I ever did when I came to London was to find the street on which the album cover had been shot. I’ve got a terrible picture of me in black and white spandex trousers and a mullet, standing there.”

• Favourite book: “It’s called The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. Mark Twain is known by everyone for his Huckleberry Finn stuff but he was also an amazing travel writer. What I love about him is that even though he wrote more than 100 years ago, he remains completely relevant and modern. He was going out on the first cruise ships and going round the Mediterranean. He was so rude about people and so honest. I love him.”

• Favourite film: “Probably Betty Blue. It was a sexual awakening because she was so gorgeous. There’s also something beautifully French about it and it was dry and weird. It reminds me of places in France that I still want to go to.”

• Where are you happiest: “I’m happiest in a place that’s three hours north of Toronto called Lake Muskoka. My wife is Canadian and she introduced me to it. It’s lakes where Torontonians go for the summer. It’s like Swallows and Amazons. You just go there and sit on a boat for a month. If you asked all of my family where they’d most like to go the answer would be Lake Muskoka.”

• Where would you eat your last supper: “I love food and I particularly love Lebanese food. So, if I was eating a favourite meal, or last supper, it would probably be somewhere like Maroush, in London’s Edgware Road.”

• Biggest achievement: “Getting on A View from The Boundary on Test Match Special with Jonathan Agnew. My father loved cricket and he’d just died. And I remember going on wishing that my dad had known I’d been on TMS. He would have been so proud. It was at Headingley and weirdly the first Test Match my dad ever took me to was Headingley in 1981 when Ian Botham scored 149 and England came back from the dead to win. We nearly left after the first day because we thought we were going to lose. But it was a bit like Trigger Happy TV. It all happened really quickly and I didn’t realise how amazing it all was until long afterwards. My dad told me it was like going to the casino for the first time and winning the house.”

• Biggest regret: “That’s a long list. But I guess it would be listening to other people.”

• What would be on your gravestone? “Ruined it for everyone.”

• How do you relax? “I watch the worst TV in the world. I’m obsessed with reality TV. There is no reality TV show that you could even conceive of that I haven’t seen. I’ll watch the worst trash TV. I love it. I really, really love it.”

• Best sporting moment? “The Olympics in Beijing, where I worked for The Independent. I went and covered the Olympics. The reason that came about was because everyone who goes to the Olympics is always an expert. And I wanted to write about what it was really like, for ordinary people. So, I wanted to write about the Olympic Village and work out what Greco-Roman Wrestling actually is.”

• Most treasured possession? “My dogs, but they own me.”

Dom Joly plays Telford’s Oakengates Theatre on February 18, Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn on March 2, Tamworth Assembly Rooms on March 15, Stourbridge Town Hall on April 8 and Birmingham's The Old Rep on April 9.