He raised hell at school before his comedy career caught fire. But his new show is truly diabolical. Marcus Brigstocke gives Miranda Jessop the low-down.
There’s no denying it: the idea of standing up in front of an audience of strangers and attempting to make them laugh must rate as one of my worst possible nightmares. Not so, however, for Marcus Brigstocke. A master of satirical comedy, this is a man who positively relishes playing to a packed out auditorium night after night.
But today there is no call for sharp one-liners or killer punchlines: the sole listener is me and I am not here to be entertained. Instead, I have come to find out about Brigstocke’s latest show, ‘Devil May Care’, which he has chosen to premiere at Clapham Common’s Omnibus Theatre.
Marcus thinks he was probably seven or eight when he first realised that he had a knack for making people laugh.
“I am always a bit wary of comedians claiming to have been the class clown, but I was definitely a version of that. I loved the role, but it did get me into trouble.”
Lots of it. He may talk of a privileged background with plenty of money, but Brigstocke’s humour was clearly covering a darker side: by the time he was 17, he’d been expelled from three different schools and had developed an extreme compulsive overeating disorder.
“My eating was wildly out of control, which is why I went into rehab,” he explains. “It was only once I was in there that I understood that alcohol and drugs were a problem for me too. And so, on 5th December 1990, I got clean.”
And all this before his eighteenth birthday: Marcus has never actually had a legal drink in his life.
His long-term ambitions, meanwhile, had always lain in acting, but his failure to get into drama school was to send him down a completely different path.
“This has actually all been a mistake!” he exclaims. “Over lunch one day, my dear friend, James, told me that I should try comedy and booked a stand-up gig for me the following week. I walked off stage and thought: ‘If I could do that for the rest of my life, I would be happy.’”
That was in 1995: just one year later, Marcus won the BBC New Comedy Award. Today he is regarded as a major comedy, writing and acting talent, performing stand-up nationally to sell-out audiences and appearing regularly on TV and radio. Even those unfamiliar with the comedy scene are likely to recognise him from the current TV ad for Experian.
“Everywhere I go, people are coming up and asking me where my data self is. But it’s fine; I don’t mind at all!”
Over the years, Marcus has learned not to be afraid of using his own life as material for his shows.
“For a long time I felt that, if you were a comedian talking about yourself, you really needed to read more and find some interesting stuff to talk about. But then my mates pointed out that, as I’d been expelled from school three times, been in rehab by the time I was 17 and worked as a podium dancer and on an oil rig, I should probably tell some of my own stories.”
Some of the moments incorporated into his shows have been pivotal: ‘God Collar’ was based on the fact that his best friend had died too young.
“I was heartbroken and grieving and, as an atheist, didn’t know what to do,” he recalls.
That friend was James Ross, the very person who had booked him his first stand-up gig.
Now Marcus is about to embark on ‘Devil May Care’, with a five-day run at the Omnibus giving Londoners the opportunity to preview the show before it heads up to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A national tour is to follow.
“I absolutely love this theatre, and playing here before Edinburgh will enable me to sculpt and mould the show into what I really want it to be.”
It’s the first time that Brigstocke has chosen to present a character-driven stand-up show, performing as Milton’s fallen angel Lucifer (Satan) from Paradise Lost.
“I’ll be fully devilled up, complete with horns, tail and malevolent grin. I want to explore the nature of good and bad. Right now there are so many people in the world of politics that I am angry with, like Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
“But do good people do bad things with good intentions? Is anyone truly wicked and are any of us wholly good? These are some of the themes I will be looking at from the point of view of this self-pitying, vain, mournful, regretful character.”
So what is it, exactly, that Marcus loves so much about stand-up?
“My ego enjoys it, obviously,” he says with a big grin. “It’s all me: I write it, I perform it, I say it. I’m only after one response and, if you give me that, I know I’ve won. That’s pretty good food for an egotist.”
But how about when it’s not all plain sailing and the dreaded hecklers begin?
“In truth you get very few hecklers and they’re usually drunk, so they’re not too much of a distraction. Saying that, somebody once threw his prosthetic leg at me. I was completely flummoxed.”
When not touring, Marcus lives in Balham – “halfway between Clapham Common and Tooting Common” – near the Omnibus. He loves it.
“Balham is really brilliant. It is home to Milk, my all-time favourite cafe, where you have to queue to get in at the weekends because the food is that good. There are so many independent cafes and restaurants and I know my butcher and greengrocer by name.”
During spells at home, Marcus also has his two teenage children with him for half of the time.
“It’s hard when your main living comes from being on the road and you have kids, not to mention a girlfriend doing her own tour,” he reflects.
Brigstocke’s marriage ended in 2013, following his affair with soap actress, Hayley Tamaddon. He is currently dating fellow comedian Rachel Parris from BBC Two’s satirical news show, The Mash Report. Completely teetotal for the past 28 years, he admits nonetheless that the compulsive overeating can sometimes still be a struggle.
“With alcohol and drugs you can stop completely, but food I have to negotiate three times a day.”
Career highlight so far?
“There have been so many, it’s impossible to pick just one. When you play somewhere like the City Varieties Music Hall, in Leeds – a stage that Chaplin, Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise all played – that’s really something. Also being booked for Glastonbury and Latitude – that’s very cool.
“I always say to new performers that, if you are making a living, even a small one, from doing something creative, then you are absolutely nailing it. I think I am extremely blessed to be able to do what I do. All I want is to keep on doing it.”
Devil May Care is at Omnibus Theatre from July 25-29; omnibus-clapham.org
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