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An Evening With Noel Fielding In Melbourne

The colourful live comedy of Noel Fielding will be gracing the Hamer Hall stage in Melbourne in April and May, but you’ve got to get your ticket fast.

Tickets have been flying out for An Evening with Noel Fielding, so much so that 15th and 16th April have completely sold out. However, you can still get tickets for 19th April and 3rd May from www.artscentremelbourne.com.au or www.ticketmaster.com.au .

The name behind celebrated shows like the Mighty Boosh and Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, as well as team captain on the hilarious Never Mind The Buzzcocks, a show with Noel Fielding is not to be missed.

What: An Evening With Noel Fielding When: 19th April and 3rd May 2015 Where: Hamer Hall, Melbourne More info + tickets: www.artscentremelbourne.com.au or www.ticketmaster.com.au

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Noel Fielding Announces Australian Comedy Tour

PEDESTRIAN.TV

One of comedy’s most casually weird performers,  Noel Fielding , has just announced a six date Australian comedy tour, performing all over the country next year in April. So, you know, get your wigs and Chelsea boots ready.  

MELBOURNE, HAMER HALL, WEDNESDAY 15 APRIL

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Arts & entertainment, design & style, travel & leisure, search concrete playground, an evening with noel fielding.

Spend an evening with The Mighty Boosh co-lead's most beloved and baffling characters.

Prepare yourself for a night of whimsy, wonder and a weird, scaly, hermaphroditic fish man named Old Gregg. Noel Fielding, the androgynous co-lead of the surreal British comedy series The Mighty Boosh , is bringing his live show, An Evening with Noel Fielding , to a capital city near you.

Combining stand-up comedy with animation and original music, as well as special appearances from some of Fielding's most beloved and baffling characters, including Fantasy Man and The Moon, the April 2015 show marks Fielding's first time in Australia since his sold-out tour in 2012. This time he'll also be joined by his younger brother Michael, best known for his recurring role on The Mighty Boosh as Naboo the Enigma, an alien shaman from the planet Xooberon.

Fielding previously played the part of Richmond in The IT Crowd , appeared as a team captain on the music comedy panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks , and helped create the comedy sketch program Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy . He is also a member of the band Loose Tapestries along with Kasabian guitarist Sergio Pizzorno, whose music will be featured in the tour.

Tickets to An Evening with Noel Fielding go on sale at 9am on Wednesday, December 17. The show begins in Auckland on Monday, April 6, following by Wellington on Friday, April 10, and Christchurch on Sunday April 12. Fielding then crosses the ditch, first to Melbourne on Wednesday April 15, then Adelaide on Friday April 17 and Canberra on Monday April 20. He'll be at the State Theatre in Sydney on Wednesday April 22, before finishing up with Perth on Friday April 24 and Brisbane on Monday April 27.

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An Evening With Noel Fielding

Thursday 11 December 2014

Noel Fielding   Australian Tour Noel Fielding will be performing in  Melbourne ,  Adelaide ,  Canberra ,  Sydney ,  Perth  and  Brisbane .

“Boosh fans, its time to dig out those lightning bolt t-shirts you bought in 2006. Noel Fielding, the Hoxton-haired half of The Mighty Boosh, is returning to Australia with An Evening With Noel Fielding. The surrealist comic is promising a mix of stand-up, live animations, music and appearances from his character creations including The Moon and Fantasy Man, his brother, Mike Fielding, best known as Naboo from the series, along with other surprise guests on stage. Imagine that!”

Noel Fielding is an English comedian, actor, artist, DJ and musician. Fielding is best known for playing Vince Noir in the award winning comedy duo, The Mighty Boosh which he co-wrote with co-star and comedy partner, Julian Barratt. In 2009 he became a team captain on music/comedy panel show, Never Mind The Buzzcocks. He also writes and appears as the central character in Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy and Luxury Comedy 2: Tales from Painted Hawaii.

An Evening With Noel Fielding promises to be anything but a normal evening. Don't miss out, come along, bring your friends, fancy dress is optional - but be quick this show will sell out!

Presented by Adrian Bohm, Triple J & Just for Laughs.

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Noel Fielding is Coming to Perth

Everyone’s favourite psychedelic dandy, comedian and hair icon Noel Fielding is coming to Perth next year.

Noel Fielding, the English comedian known primarily for his portrayal of South London trendy Vince Noir in cult comedy ‘The Mighty Boosh’, will be touring Australia with his show ‘An Evening With Noel Fielding’.

Fielding also plays himself in the surreal, brightly coloured television series ‘Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy’, in which he has Andy Warhol as a Butler and plays such characters as Fantasy Man; the cup-chinned adventurer of a parallel universe, Secret Peter; the purple blob with an East London accent, manta ray and record producer Tony Reason, Roy Circles the berieved anthropomorphic chocolate finger biscuit and PE Teacher, and more.

Audiences can expect a blend of animation, music, sketch and stand up. Noel’s brother Mike Fielding, a.k.a. Naboo from ‘The Mighty Boosh’ and Smooth from ‘Luxury Comedy’ will also be appearing. There will be music written by Noel and Kasabian guitarist Serge Pizzorno.

‘An Evening With Noel Fielding’ will be visiting the Riverside Theatre on Friday April 24th, 2015. Tickets go on sale on Wednesday December 17th. More information available here.

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Noel Fielding on the last days of The Mighty Boosh, the end of his youth, and his Camden camel

He worked 'incredibly hard' to elevate the mighty boosh to arena-filling world tours. then they imploded, 'luxury comedy' got cancelled and so did 'never mind the buzzcocks'. noel fielding frets to alice jones about being 'in limbo', the possibility of children and being the next spike milligan, article bookmarked.

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“I'm not Mr Weird,” says Noel Fielding. “I don't go home and live in a psychedelic castle made out of bubbles, you know.” So what is his house like? “It is quite psychedelic, actually. It's like Yellow Submarine in there.” He guffaws and throws himself back on the sofa, kicking his silver pixie boots into the air.

The boots are the least outlandish element of the comedy star's look today, comprising as it does tight jeans, a shaggy black fur coat with a Chanel logo spray-painted on the back, a giant patent handbag in the shape of a watermelon and, painted across his face, some bright Bowie zig-zags. Does he ever have a dress-down day, slob out a bit? “What, when I put big shorts on? Don't do my hair?” He looks a bit baffled. “I don't go out like that.” When he was younger, he saw Jarvis Cocker in the street, looking cool in top-to-toe corduroy, “and I remember thinking, if you ever become famous, you have to maintain your image. If you saw Nick Cave in the supermarket in tracksuit bottoms, you'd kill yourself. I'm not particularly a slippers and dressing gown type. I don't have that wiring. I don't have a weird tracksuit I put on when I get in… That's not my zone.”

Noel Fielding's zone, as most people know by now, is surreal, funny, psychedelic and a little bit rock'n'roll. (The day after we meet, he interviews Ronnie Wood in Waterstone's about his new book and posts a picture online; they look like father and son – all angles and bouffant hair.) He attained cult comedy status as one half of the Mighty Boosh and mainstream fame on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. His rival team captain on the show, Phill Jupitus, dubbed him a “gothic George Best”; his best friend, Serge Pizzorno of Kasabian, called him a “modern-day Dali”. He is a playful polymath, hopping about in his pointy boots from sitcoms to animations to stand-up, acting to art exhibitions. “Just say I'm a genius,” he drawls.

He is about to go on tour for a second UK leg of his solo show, An Evening With Noel Fielding, having already taken it around the UK, Australia and New Zealand. “I start getting bored and misbehaving if I don't work hard. It's fine when you're younger, you go out a lot and muck around with your mates and drink and stuff, but I'm a bit over that now.” When the Boosh was at its height – the final arena tour in 2009 played to more than a quarter-of-a-million fans – Fielding would party all night with his younger brother Mike (aka Naboo from the Boosh), then get up at 6pm in time for the next show's soundcheck. His current tour, still featuring Mike in a variety of daft roles, including Fielding's fictional wife, has, by contrast, been the “peppermint tea tour”. “We're too old. I'm too old,” he says.

Fielding is 42 and feeling it a bit. There is more than one moment in the show when he wonders why he's still prancing around pretending to be a chicken boy, or a herbal teabag, or the moon (which he plays, memorably, by covering his face with half a can of shaving foam). Is he worried about getting older? “Forty-two, Jesus Christ. Peter Pan… When you're young, people say, 'Yeah, he's young, he's daft, he does all this weird stuff,' and then you have success and people say, 'Oh right, he's good.' And maybe in 10 years, I'll be seen as eccentric, like Vic Reeves or Spike Milligan, which would be amazing. But I suppose I'm in this weird transitional period between having some success doing weird stuff and not being eccentric yet. I'm in limbo!”

He cackles, but limbo is on the nail. Earlier this year, Never Mind the Buzzcocks was axed. Fielding, who had been on the show since 2009, found out when the press did. “If a show has lasted that long and people like it, why would you get rid of it? It wasn't losing ratings. People liked it, it wasn't an aggressive male panel show. I liked it before I was on it.” Would he have carried on? “Yeah! I loved doing it – it was very easy… I never know the thinking behind television.”

He is still smarting, too, from his last solo foray on E4, Luxury Comedy. In fact, it is all he wants to talk about, though the second series was broadcast more than 18 months ago and there won't be a third. “No! It was too harrowingly stressful. Someone called the show the second 9/11,” he says with a sad little grin. “We live in strange times.”

He had “absolute freedom” to do what he liked on the show. So there were cartoons and characters such as Roy Circles, a chocolate finger with shellshock; Secret Peter, who is made out of melted Jelly Tots; and Fantasy Man, who rides a porcelain unicorn called Arnold 5. Why didn't it work? “Maybe there were just way too many characters and not enough time to digest them all. What I liked was that it didn't adhere to any rules. It was like, 'Well, we're doing this and then this and then this and then this and then it's over. Bye!'” he sighs. “We shouldn't have called it Luxury Comedy, we should have called it something weird. The problem with calling it a comedy is that it's got to be funny, first and foremost. And we paid as much attention to the visual side of it. I would maintain, regardless of what people thought of it, that there were more ideas in one episode than in most things. It was brave.”

Where do his ideas come from? “I don't know what's wrong with me. There is something wrong with me,” he says. “I don't know if it's just because my mum and dad were into a lot of psychedelic stuff in the 1960s and 1970s. You know in Asterix when Obelix fell into the magic potion? I think I fell into a pot of LSD. I've always had a good imagination. If I saw a sitcom and everything was made out of cheese, I wouldn't go 'WHAT?!' I wouldn't get angry. I'd think, 'Right, OK, all cheese? Amazing…'”

Born in London to young, liberal parents, Fielding grew up a “painfully shy” child who loved drawing. No one ever thought the young Noel would become a comedian, but he adored Vic and Bob, and while he was at art college in Buckinghamshire in the mid-1990s, he started writing odd little stories. One night he decided to perform them, at his first gig, in Cambridge; as it happened, his future colleague Jupitus was on the bill. “I was going to run away because I couldn't handle it but he gave me a big hug and said, 'They're just people, it's fine. Just do it.' And it went really well.”

He met Julian Barratt soon after, and the Boosh was born. They won the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1998, landed a Radio 4 series, and their TV show began on BBC3 in 2004. Would it still be commissioned now, in these risk-averse, online-BBC3 times? “Yeah. I thought we were good. We were one of the best live acts around. We worked so incredibly hard. There was no option of not getting on. I was so driven.”

At the height of the Boosh's popularity, Mike Myers wanted to write a film with them, and, Fielding tells me, Jack Black and Ben Stiller were desperate to work with them. Robin Williams came to their show. They had offers to go to America. “Maybe we should have gone – that would have been a way of sustaining it. [But] we needed a break. We'd worked together for 15 years, every day. We were sick of each other.”

Did they argue? “No, that's the problem, slightly. It was just a lot of tension. Like a marriage. All of a sudden it was just POWWWW and everyone was sick of each other. It was mental. We didn't have a day off in 10 years. It was like being in The Beatles.”

The end came in 2009, after a 100-date tour. They were making a lot of money and there were a lot of people with a vested interest in keeping it going. “So we tried to write a film, and it all sort of imploded.”

Barratt now has eight-year old twin boys with his partner, the comedian Julia Davis. Fielding and he are still friends; they live on the same street in north London and play tennis together. “The possibility of us doing something together is always still there,” says Fielding. Ideally, a Boosh film. “The combination of us two was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You meet someone and you just work, you have chemistry on stage, and writing. That will never happen again for me, I don't think. Which is a real shame. I work with a lot of good people in a good way, like Russell [Brand] and Richard Ayoade, but I don't think I'll ever have that again.”

He is just back from a month in France where he was writing a family film – “a Time Bandits/Labyrinth thing” – and two TV shows (one for America). He'd like to write a children's book, and to act. “But not a part that someone would give me; something people wouldn't imagine.” He struggles to focus on one thing at a time. “If I was rich, it would be fine...” He must be quite rich. “I'm all right. But it goes pretty quickly.”

He lives with his long-term girlfriend, the XFM DJ Lliana Bird, and is at once intrigued and horrified by the idea of having children: “My friends who have kids look like they haven't been to bed for a year. They all look like they've been shot in the legs, or have typhoid or something,” he says. “Because of the Boosh, I got trapped. It takes 10 years to get where you want to get and then you have 10 years there and you think, fuck, I'm this age, all my friends have 10-year old kids… I suppose if it happens, I'll concentrate on that. It's a selfish life being a comedian, isn't it? Bit self-obsessed, really.”

Does he find real life a little boring? “Yeah. Painfully dull. I guess I've carved out a style and once you have some success with that, then there's an expectation that you will do something slightly different. You can't just abandon it, it's part of what you do. It's hard to change. I'd like to do something more real, I've never tried that. That's what I'm trying to write next – something simple.” How's that going? He hoots. “Well, it's a story about a camel. Who lives in Camden.”

Alice Jones is deputy arts editor of The Independent. 'An Evening with Noel Fielding' tours the UK from 12 November to 13 December; a DVD of the live show is out on 16 November

Beyond Boosh: How the mighty have moved on

Julian Barratt

Barratt, who played Howard, has continued to act on TV (Little Crackers, Being Human) and on stage (The Government Inspector at the Young Vic, NSFW at the Royal Court) while also directing, and narrating several BBC documentaries.

Mike Fielding

The Boosh took its name from a Spanish friend's description of the childhood hairstyle (“mighty bush”) worn by Noel's brother, who played Naboo. He moved to Australia after the Boosh toured there. He will appear in the film Zombie Women of Satan 2 in 2016.

In addition to being a comedian and actor, Brown (Bollo the ape) is an art director who designs books and DVD covers – including those for the Boosh's live tour and boxset – and has mounted photography exhibitions of fellow comedians.

Rich Fulcher

The American comedian, who played Bob Fossil, co-wrote and starred in BBC3 sketch show Snuff Box, with Matt Berry. He also adapted his 2009 book Tiny Acts of Rebellion into a sell-out stage show at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Don Connigale

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noel fielding is an english comedian, actor, artist and musician. He is co-creator of the mighty boosh, luxury comedy and appears on never mind the buzzcocks. he is also the foundER of loose tapestries formed with kasabian’s sergio pizzorno.

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND TOUR 2015

We can now announce An Evening with Noel Fielding will be reaching Australia & New Zealand with newly confirmed dates!

Tickets will go on presale on Monday 15th December 2pm – Tuesday 16th December 5pm

The general public release of tickets will follow on Wednesday 17th December at 9am.

Please see all dates below:

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Interview: Noel Fielding

Home » Interview: Noel Fielding

Noel Fielding is currently inside his first solo tour for five years. The comedian, who thanks to his work on The Mighty Boosh, Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy and Never Mind The Buzzcocks, has an enormously loyal following, is starring in a new show, simply entitled, An Evening with Noel Fielding.

Featuring Noel’s inimitable blend of stand-up, animation, music and appearances by some of his best-loved characters, including The Moon, The Dark Side of the Moon and Fantasy Man, it’s a blinding show. As Noel himself puts it, “You’d be a fool to miss out. Come along, bring your Nan. Fancy dress optional.”

Noel and I are chatting in his north London studio. Surrounded by props – including life-size cardboard cut-outs of a robber with a stripy jumper and a swag bag and a nun wielding a huge gun – and his own arresting paintings, he makes for marvellously entertaining company. It is a delight to spend an hour in the company of this hilarious and magnetic comedian.

But don’t just take my word for it. The critics have been queuing up to praise this comedian who can be summed up by all those adjectives beginning with C: charismatic, comic, charming, compelling. The Daily Telegraph calls Noel, “A comedy wunderkind”, while The Guardian has described his work as, “A neo-psychedelic riot of mirth.” And Phil Jupitus, no less, labels him, “A Gothic George Best.”

The five years away from the live arena have only whetted Noel’s appetite for stand-up. He can’t wait to get back in front of an audience. The performer, who has spent the last few years occupied by the meticulously produced, semi-animated E4 show, Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, begins by underlining that nothing beats the rush generated by live work. “The problem with TV is that it takes years to make, and after a while you can’t remember what it’s like to tell a joke and get a laugh from it.

“The great thing about live comedy is that it cuts out the middle men – all those TV producers and directors. It takes out everything that gets in the way, so it’s just you and the audience. It’s a really pure set-up.”

Because it’s so deeply original and innovative, Noel’s comedy can divide people. But he thinks that the infectious nature of his stand-up show can help to win over the agnostics. “Some people might think they’re allergic to you, but if they come to a live show and see everyone is laughing, it’s hard to say that it’s not funny. It was the same with the Boosh. Sceptics were convinced when they came to our shows.

“As a stand-up, you spend all day being nervous. But as soon as you step onto the stage and get the first laugh, it’s magic time. It’s like being in a dream. It’s a real buzz.”

Noel, who for many years has been a highly popular team captain on BBC2’s widely-loved and very long-running pop quiz, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, is also relishing the prospect of touring the country. “It’s great,” he enthuses. “You get to visit all these nice places you’ve never been to before. When you arrive at a lot of towns, you just go, ‘Wow!’”

The comedian, who will be joined on stage in “An Evening with Noel Fielding” by the loose stylings of his brother Michael Fielding (best known as Naboo and Smooth from The Mighty Boosh) and the physical lunacy of Tom Meeten (who plays Andy Warhol in Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy), proceeds to let us in on the plot for “An Evening with Noel Fielding.”

“The first half is set in a cabaret club,” he reveals. “Then I get kidnapped from my own show, and in the second half the rest of the characters have to find me. I’ll be playing other characters during the second half. It becomes like a play. It’s a sort of farce.”

The show promises a typically uplifting variety of disparate elements. “That’s why I’ve called it ‘An Evening with Noel Fielding’, because it’s not something I’d usually do,” the comedian explains. “It’s more like something Barry Humphries would do.”

The evening will also feature music that Noel has composed with Serge Pizzorno from Kasabian and some characteristically entrancing stand-up routines. Noel, who for many years performed with his close friend Julian Barratt in The Mighty Boosh, dubbed “The funniest comedy double act in Britain” by the NME,  discloses some of the themes he will be addressing in this part of the show. “I touch on turning 40 and my Peter Pan complex. Because I’m now 40, I try to do a bleak bit, but of course it soon becomes completely fantastical. I attempt to go gritty, but I can’t help going fantasy.”

As an example, Noel says he has been working up the character of Chicken Man. “He’s like a figure from a Jodorowsky Spaghetti Western. He’s half man, half chicken. He has to fight a bandit, and he’s got Tourette’s. He’s like a cross between A Streetcar Named Desire and Foghorn Leghorn. He keeps flipping in and out of madness.”

Noel’s comedy is always richly imaginative, but can he tell if he’s gone too far? “No!” laughs the comedian, who has also acted in The IT Crowd, Nathan Barley and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. “Locked away in North London for years making Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, we’d think, ‘Let’s do something based on William Blake’s painting, The Ghost of a Flea.’ That could be very self-indulgent.

“But it could only exist on telly. Doing stand-up, you’re edited by the audience. If you take too mad a line, you’ll lose people. But on the other hand, if something is getting big laughs, it’ll never leave the show.”

Noel, who is hopeful that he and Julian will one day find the time to make a long-planned movie, continues that, “There are certain things that you just know will work. At one point, I play a herbal tea bag. I knew that would strike a chord because everyone has tea.

“The Chicken Man was more of a gamble, but people really seem to like him. They’re also really enjoying a section where Tom plays Antonio Banderas and Michael plays Hawkeye, the living embodiment of the tennis line judge. It’s great to think up these ideas and then watch them take flight.”

The comedian attempts to sum up the style of the show. “It’s so abstract. It’s like you turn the radio dial, and something random comes on. You’re not quite sure what it is, but you warm to it.”

So what does the comic hope that audiences will take away from “An Evening with Noel Fielding”? “I hope they have a really good time,” Noel declares. “I hope they laugh their heads off. I’ve always been very concerned not to sell people short. But the only danger is that the show ends up as long as the film Gandhi!” Ever philosophical, Noel carries on that, “I suppose if it doesn’t work, I’ll have to do something else. What would I do? Breed shire horses!”

The only drawback about touring as far as Noel is concerned is that, “You’re buzzing with adrenaline when you come off stage. You have to do something with that, and it’s very hard not to go and get drunk. In the old days, we’d give the Rolling Stones a run for their money with our after-show behaviour.

“But now I’m in my forties, I have to find new ways to calm myself down. Like Mick Jagger, I’ll have to get fit. After the show, Michael and I used to go drinking. This time we’ll have to go to mazes and local markets and drink peppermint tea.”

Unable to resist one last gag, Noel concludes: “It’s the Peppermint Tea Tour. I should have called it that!”

Details of the An Evening with Noel Fielding tour can be found at http://www.mcintyre-ents.com/talent/noel-fielding/

Article by James Rampton

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Noel Fielding

Noel fielding is a comedy performer and writer behind the multi-award winning series the mighty boosh alongside julian barratt..

His own series Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy and the follow-up Luxury Comedy: Tales From Painted Hawaii were broadcast on E4. Read More

[email protected] 020 7287 1112

[email protected] 020 7287 1112

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Emma Torrens [email protected]

Noel's own series Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy and the follow-up Luxury Comedy: Tales From Painted Hawaii were broadcast on E4. He has appeared in various guises on shows such as Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, The IT Crowd , and How Not To Live Your Life , and as a team captain on Never Mind The Buzzcocks . Noel is also an accomplished stand-up comedian and has performed shows all over the world. Painting is one of Noel's great passions and he regularly shows his work around the country.

He currently hosts the hugely popular Great British Bake Off on Channel 4.

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The Weird World of Noel Fielding

By emma brown, photographed by victoria stevens, photography victoria stevens, march 2, 2016.

NOEL FIELDING IN NEW YORK, JANUARY 2016. PHOTOS:  VICTORIA STEVENS . GROOMING :  NATE ROSENKRANZ / HONEY ARTISTS USING ALTERNA HAIR CARE. 

To truly appreciate Noel Fielding’s comedy, you must allow yourself to get drawn into his world. It’s a pretty surreal place, where anything—from gorillas to inanimate objects—can be a character, and characters are expressed through multiple mediums including music and visuals. After nearly two decades on stage, however, the British actor, artist, and comedian knows how to engage his audience. It’s not just about his charisma—though with his signature coiffe, eyeliner, and mod clothing, he is quite charming. It’s also about structure. Even if it seems like Fielding goes off on random tangents onstage, by the time he tours a show, he’s established a carefully constructed journey of augmenting oddness. “It’s getting the balance right so that they’re going, ‘Oh my god, how did we get here?’ Or they’re laughing because they trust you by that point,” he explains.

“I have a bit in my show where I play a half-man, half-chicken,” Fielding says of his current act,  An Evening with Noel Fielding .  “I can’t start with that because people would just be like, ‘What’s happening?” he continues. “I do some stuff that’s more accessible, and then I gradually start doing a bit more weird stuff, and then I do this long piece about teabags where I play a bunch of different teabags in a cupboard. By the end, it gets to this bit where my wife’s having an affair with a triangle and where I play a half-man, half-chicken.”

In the U.K., Fielding is a well-known entity. In the U.S., where he’ll be touring  An Evening  this month, he’s more of a cult figure. There are those who know him from  The Mighty Boosh (2003-2007) , his show with his frequent writing partner Julian Barrett, and others who think of him as Richmond, the goth from The   IT Crowd (2006-2013) . But Fielding’s work extends past the stage and screen. A graduate of Croydon Art College, the 42-year-old has published a book of his artwork ( Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton, Canongate UK, 2012)  and exhibited at the likes of the Saatchi Gallery and the Royal Albert Hall.

Here, we discuss Fielding’s entry into comedy in the late 1990s and the evolution of  The Mighty Boosh . 

EMMA BROWN: What did you want to be when you were five years old?

NOEL FIELDING: [ laughs ] When I was five? A cowboy. I used to wear this cowboy outfit. I wouldn’t take off. It was ridiculous. My mum was like, “You’ve got to take that off sometime,” and I was like, “No way, this is it.” It was the ’70s—it was turquoise and yellow, really psychedelic colors. I wanted to be a psychedelic cowboy. Or a zookeeper—that’s why we ended up doing the first series [of The Mighty Boosh ]. Or a painter. When I was three or four, I was really good at drawing and painting, and everyone used to say, “You’re going to go to art college.” I didn’t really know what that meant. When you’re a kid and someone’s an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don’t think that’s a job; you just think of a man with a beard painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

BROWN: Do you come from a creative family?

FIELDING: A funny family. My mum and dad are both really funny. My granddad’s really funny, my uncle’s really funny, everyone’s really funny. You have to be quick, otherwise you get roasted. Everyone takes the piss quite a lot. You have to be really sharp.

BROWN: Did you have imaginary friends as a child?

FIELDING: There was a big age difference between me and my brothers—about 10 years—so I was an only child for a long time. I used to hang out a lot on my own. I played a lot of weird games with a lot of imaginary people. I guess it’s kind of roleplaying, isn’t it? I had a cat called Jethro who had one eye, and I used to hang out with my cat quite a lot. When I was a really young child, I felt like I could see fairies. I was convinced there were fairies in my grandmother’s garden.

BROWN: Were they traditional fairies—little girls with flower hats?

FIELDING: Not just women, men in little green jackets. They were moving really fast, like birds almost, like tiny creatures. I don’t know what that was about. When you’re quite young, your imagination’s quite free.

BROWN: I wanted to talk about the beginning of your career. You won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1998. 

FIELDING: With Julian [Barratt]? Yeah. I did a standup competition earlier, in 1996 or something, and I got to the final. Frankie Boyle won it and I came in second. It was the first thing I did. Then the year after I did a standup show with Frankie Boyle and a few other people—Chris Addison, who directs Veep and was in The Thick of It . We had the same agents who said, “Why don’t you just do a half hour of standup each, rather than writing a whole hour of standup?” But then we got together and I said, “This would be quite good if we just do a crazy show. I don’t really want to do a half hour of standup.” And he was like, “No, nor do I.” Then we started writing a song about a mammoth and we were thinking it would be quite funny if we could make a smoothie on stage and if we got a girl to cry into it and drank it and fell in love with her. Then we thought it’d be good if we were in a zoo playing zookeepers, and we had an idea for this boss who sucks us through his eyes into this magic forest, and that became Rich Fulcher’s part. Rich wasn’t around when we were writing it, so we just told him we wanted to do a boss at a zoo called Bob Fossil—”You’re going to suck us into this magic forest”—and he sort of improvised it all.

The Boosh did well straight away. There was nothing quite like it. [Flight of the] Conchords do that kind of stuff now, but at that point… When we were just doing comedy, we did a rap song because we were into the Beastie Boys and Beck and hip-hop and stuff like Kool Keith. We wanted to do a rap song. We thought it’d be quite good if this zookeeper that Julian always talks about—his hero is a zookeeper that went missing—appears at the end. He disappeared and then Julian built him up as this amazing guy. And then there’s this character, a jazz-fusion guitarist in the forest, and he has a big afro with a door in it and he opens it and the zookeeper is inside his afro. He’s called Tommy and does a drum and bass rap. [ laughs ] That was the extent of our first show. But it was different, no one was doing stuff like that at the time. I think being in bands—I’ve been in bands—you’re not coming from a comedian’s point of view. I’ve done painting and Julian was into music. We just found the idea of standup a little bit limiting.

BROWN: When you came in second in the 1996 competition, what was your material?

FIELDING: That was me on my own. It was a long time ago. It would’ve probably been some stuff about having a starfish as a pet from my parents. All my friends got dogs and cats for Christmas, and I got a starfish called Roy. I used to take him down to the park on a lead. It was a weird, long, rambling story. There was some other stuff about chimpanzees—another weird, long, rambling story. And another thing where my dad was a hammerhead shark. I can’t even remember what these jokes were but they were very surreal. If the audience went for it, it went really well. If they didn’t get on board it was difficult.

BROWN: What was the split? Was the audience generally on board?

FIELDING: When you start, it’s not to do with the material so much. It’s more to do with how you can control a crowd and make friends with an audience and sell your brand of humor. When you’re new, you’re not really good at that yet. You haven’t really got the stage skills to sell bad material. They either go for it or they don’t. You’re a bit stranded if they don’t. I think I had a really good semifinal then at the final, I wasn’t too good because I’d been up all night worrying about it.

BROWN: Have you died recently on stage?

FIELDING: [ laughs ] No. Maybe in America this is different, but you don’t really die once you’ve been doing it two or three years. If you’re going to be a good standup, or a successful standup, or a standup who can work for money, you have to eliminate the possibility of dying quickly. If you still are dying three or four years in, maybe you should be a writer or an actor, maybe it’s not going to be the thing for you. I learned that quite quickly—I could get an audience into my world and if you can do that, they’ll go with you not all the way, but a lot of the way. [ laughs ]

BROWN: What’s the London comedy scene like? You seem to know everyone.

FIELDING: I think I just know everyone because I’ve been doing it so long. In comedy, you see yourself as a newcomer and then you realize you’ve been doing it for 18, 20 years, which is ridiculous. But I don’t really do gigs in London very often. When The Boosh was big it was impossible because if I did a small club it would sell out to just fans. I’d have to do unannounced gigs because your fans will laugh at everything because they know what you do already. What you really want is a neutral audience that isn’t too harsh—a good comedy crowd—but that don’t know necessarily what you’re doing. It’s very difficult once you’ve been on telly because people know what you do. They give you a little bit of grace but then they’re harsher if you’re not funny, so you have to be funny. Whereas you’re sort of a cheeky surprise when you’re unknown. Me and Julian always felt like if you take yourself off somewhere private and make stuff and then bring it out, it’s the best way because you’re not influenced by the scene and the circuit. There’s these weird little pockets—it’s like school, the comedy circuit. There’s people who are annoying, people who are bitter, people who are really nice, people who are friendly, new people, people who have been doing it forever. It’s a bit like that in Edinburgh [at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival] as well, it’s a bit cliquey and we always tried to separate ourselves from that. Also we decided instead of going around to different clubs all the time we would just do a residency in one place.

BROWN: Where did you do the residency?

FIELDING: In Highbury in this place called The Hen & Chickens, which was a little tiny theater above a pub—it held about 58 seats. We did it every Monday, which was a graveyard slot, but we worked out quite quickly that all our friends who had been out on the weekends liked watching something mellow [on Monday evenings]. We used to do an hour or so. We’d do cabaret stuff in the beginning—have a few of our mates on and musical stuff—and then have a break and then do the show we were going to take to Edinburgh in whatever state it was in, add a new 10 minutes every week or a new 15 minutes. That was how we’d do our shows. We did that for three years and that’s how we learned to try weird stuff. You couldn’t have done it in the confines of a comedy club because there would’ve been standups before you. We did a character where we had a tiny horse on a record player spinning around, a lot of weird shit that was visual, musical, that there’s no way you could’ve done between two standups.

We did do this one place, which is a proper comedy club. We didn’t even have a name at that point, so people would come in and say, “Those two guys are going to be on? The ones who call themselves Lego Wolves?” or whatever we called ourselves. We’d go on after the interval so if we were supposed to be in a forest we’d put loads of fake plants and trees everywhere, and we’d have a big boombox and weird sounds like a forest. We just did 10 minutes of us lost in the forest —a double act thing. And again, that was the basis of our first Edinburgh show.

I guess really what we were doing was looking for a way of doing comedy that wasn’t standup, that was theatrical and musical and visual, and a double act. Also Rich Fulcher was in it, so we had two English, mumbling, quiet people and then a quite brash American. It was quite the contrast. Eventually we added my brother who played the shaman, and then we added Bollo the Gorilla. We had a team: Dave [Brown] was really good at dancing and [my brother] Mike [Fielding] was really deadpan, Rich had a lot of energy, and me and Julian were the double act. We had a lot of skills in that little group so we were good at making shows. We evolved it really slowly and we toured it a little bit, we did radio shows, we did TV shows, we did big tours, we did a festival. The only thing we didn’t do is a film really, which hopefully one day we will.

BROWN: Have you had any surprising Boosh fans?

FIELDING: America was quite weird. It got really big in England really quickly, and it was kind of scary. We went on tour, and the first day we went on tour in York we tried to come outside the venue and there were 500 people outside. They were screaming and dressed up like characters from our show and they chased us to the hotel. My tourmate was Australian and he went, “Shit, what have you done? This is like The Beatles mate. You’re fucked.” We didn’t have a clue, it took us by surprise; we didn’t know anyone was watching. It quickly expanded until we were doing arenas and playing 10,000-seat venues. We’d do book signings and they’d camp out overnight and we’d have 7,000 people trying to get in… It was ridiculous. Then we came here [to the U.S.] and the fans here were much more hardcore, they had tattoos of Old Greg, Howard Moon, and Julian. People had driven from all over the country to come to these shows we did at the Roxy and the Bowery in New York. People drove from everywhere and got flights—they were much more serious, in a way. But then when I did Australia recently, they were nuts. They probably liked it even more than the English people. They loved The Boosh straight away, instantly. We’ve got a cult following here but I don’t know how this tour will go at all, which is quite exciting because you’re not in that position anymore—you used to be in that position when you started out.

BROWN: Where are you going on this tour?

FIELDING: We’re doing Boston and New York and Chicago and Portland and Seattle and Vancouver. Toronto, L.A., San Francisco—all the usual places. I don’t think we’re doing anywhere like Kansas. We’re not doing the deep South. We’re doing hipster towns, I guess, and they’re not massive venues. When we first came here as The Boosh , we’d done everything we could do in England so were ready to storm America. “We’re coming, The Boosh is coming!” It was really exciting, and we met Jack Black and Ben Stiller and Mike Myers and Trey Parker—like opening the door, and Mike Myers is like, “Let’s write a film,” and Robin Williams is coming to the gig and talking about the crack fox. We were quite overwhelmed. We were thinking of moving here and trying to do TV show but we had just done 12, 15 years in England and Julian had just had kids, so maybe it wasn’t the right timing. I always had a little bit of a regret about that. I always wanted to travel around and see lots of America, I’d never been to Boston, I’d never been to San Francisco even, so I’m quite excited to just go the places.

BROWN: Have there been any comedians that have come up to you and cited The Boosh as an influence?

FIELDING: [ laughs ] Yeah, there were loads. It’s manifested in other places, which is weird. Like the guy who makes Regular Show, he’s constantly citing us as a massive influence. I know the guys who did Spongebob were massive fans of The Boosh and they got Rich to do a voice. I see our influence in a lot of weird places, like films and animation and kid’s TV, and not necessarily other comedians. I guess it wasn’t really like comedy; it has more in common with Adventure Time or Regular Show than it has with a sitcom like Two and a Half Men . We’re light years away from that. We don’t own weirdness, we don’t own that style of stuff, but we got there first. It made it difficult for people with a similar sensibility to break through without people saying, “It’s a bit like The Boosh , what you’re doing.”

There was always this comparison between us and [Flight of] the Conchords, which I liked, because I really liked them. We’re friends with them. They started in music—we [went] from comedy to music, and they were music to comedy. I always thought it’d be quite fun to do a film with them, two double acts against each other in some sort of competition. There are a lot of young kids coming through who are a bit weird now. I think Russell Brand was quite a big influence on standup in England, Simon Amstell . I remember being really influenced by Eddie Izzard and Harry Hill and Stewart Lee and Monty Python , The Goon Show , Spike Milligan. You have to have people that you love and you try to be a bit like them, and then you find your own style from that. I was quite a bit like Eddie Izzard when I started, maybe more surreal. It’s always weird when kids go, “I love your standup, I try to do stuff like you.” I think, “Really? I don’t really know what I’m doing. How can you be copying me? I have no idea what’s happening.”

NOEL FIELDING’S U.S. TOUR, AN EVENING WITH NOEL FIELDING , BEGINS MARCH 10 IN BOSTON. HE WILL PLAY SIX SHOWS IN NEW YORK AT THE GRAMERCY THEATRE FROM MARCH 14 TO 19. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT FIELDING’S WEBSITE . 

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• Interview with Noel Fielding
• Arts & Culture

By London Calling

The Boosh, his UK tour, London. Noel tells all.

"We were doing a show about a Crack Fox and a transsexual merman with a mangina, and people actually liked it - that was pretty amazing"

At the peak of The Mighty Boosh -mania, you couldn’t pick up a newspaper without seeing a photo of surrealist comedy superstar Noel Fielding and his gang of showbiz mates (Amy Winehouse, Jonny Borrell & co) stumbling out of a Camden boozer. These days, the fantastically flamboyant Noel, he of the silver pointy boots and wild-child hairdo, is more likely to be supping a peppermint tea than a pint, as the workaholic puts his insatiable imagination to work planning his forthcoming UK tour.

“Julien [Barratt] and I both thought that it was mental, how big the Boosh got,” says Noel, as he takes London Calling on an impromptu jaunt down memory lane. “Because it’s such a weird show, and considering we didn’t compromise on anything. We were doing a show about a Crack Fox and a transsexual merman with a mangina, and people actually liked it - that was pretty amazing,” laughs Noel. By all accounts, the Boosh tour was an equally insane experience for all involved. “We had Marilyn Manson’s tour bus; there was a party gang at one end with really loud music, all dark and insane like a nightclub, and a sort of cheese-and-jazz gang at the other end, where people watched black and white films…you can guess who was the head of each camp!” he giggles. That tour was so big and it was making so much money for everyone involved, that it reached a point where you could have said ‘I’m going to sleep on the roof of the tour bus tonight’ and the organisers would have said ‘alright we’ll set you up a bed’.”

This time around, Noel is looking forward to playing some smaller venues - “much better for comedy, when you do gigs at places like the O2, it takes 30 seconds for the laughter to echo back to you” - and explains how An Evening With Noel Fielding is a little more “ The Muppets -style. There’s going to be a Plasticine World [inspired by Plasticine Joey Ramone, as seen in Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy ], and The Moon, because he was my character even before the Boosh .” Noel is taking along his brother and frequent right-hand-funnyman, Mike Fielding, as well as Luxury’ sTom Meeton, because “I didn’t want to go around on my own, you know? It’s much nicer to go on tour with a bit of a gang.”

Always a sociable creature, for a while - during the era of London’s daily free papers - Noel seemed to be the epicentre of the capital’s party scene. “Those papers had to fill their pages with something, so often it would just be photos of Amy and me stumbling out of the Groucho,” he says, shaking his head. “I wasn’t actually going out that much, they just made it look like I was, but I wasn’t - how would I have got anything done?!” Revealing that he “goes a bit weird, and start doing silly things” when he isn’t working, the allure of the showbiz life has definitely worn off for Noel now. “After a while, you’ve been to every party in the WORLD, by the end you’ve been to a party in the most exclusive guestlist VIP room beyond VIP room, with Kate Moss, you know it’s not going to get any better than that. Eventually, the parties get so exclusive that you are just in a tiny cubicle on your own,” he laughs.

Noel is still a fixture on the Camden/Kentish Town landscape, even though these days, he lives in the slightly more peaceful Highgate. “When I was little, I lived in South London, and my mum and dad used to bring me to Camden to get jackets and jeans. It was so alternative, so cool. Going to Camden was always a BIG event. Now I just look at it and go ‘what happened?’” he says, with an air of sadness.

“When we first went to The Hawley Arms, Amy Winehouse was going there, Razorlight were hanging out there, it was all like a little bit of a ‘scene’. It was something that grew naturally out of just a feeling. Friends telling each other to go down there, because it was pretty cool. When we were at art college, we went there because we heard that Blur were there, so we’d go there to have a look. So I felt like at the end of the Hawley ‘era’, it had become a bit like that. People were coming because they heard Winehouse was there.”

Noel hasn’t yet had a chance to see the newly unveiled statue of his late friend in person, but he’s seen photos of the Amy sculpture. “Wow…I mean…it’s pretty weird, isn’t it? It doesn’t really look like her! I liked that it’s black, and that the rose is red, that’s quite cool,” he says, distinctly unsure. “It’s a nice thing that it exists,” he decides firmly. “That’s what you want, isn’t it, a sculpture? The ultimate accolade. And she is so integral to that scene, she was an amazing woman. She’s still really important to people.”

As for the surrealist rapscallion himself, Noel would like to leave his own permanent mark on Camden Town. “When they still had a roof garden at the Hawley, before the fire, I used to run across that wall, two storeys up, in my silver boots, and get everyone to clap. The owner always used to grab me, ‘gerroff Noel, you’re gonna fall!’ So I’d like a plaque there, which says ‘Noel used to run across here, like a drunken iiiiidiot.’”

The UK tour An Evening with Noel Fielding starts on 20 October, for tickets and more info please click here .

Noel Fielding on Comparing 'Dick Turpin' & 'Our Flag' and Non-Traditional Male Heroes

Ellie White, Noel Fielding, Marc Wootton, and Duayne Boachie in 'The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin' Season 1 

Most Americans hadn't heard of Noel Fielding prior to 2017, when he was hired by Channel 4 to host The Great British Baking Show in place of Sue and Mel when the series moved house from the BBC. But Fielding had a cult following among fans of British comedy for his series The Mighty Boosh , which aired in the U.K. between 2003 and 2007. Fielding starred in it alongside comedian Julian Barratt , and the series's surrealism landed it a spot among the shows on late-night Adult Swim.

However, it had been a decade since Fielding's comedy had come over to America, and his comedy on GBBO wound up overshadowed by comparisons to previous hosts, the succession of co-hosts that passed through the tent beside him, and Paul Hollywood 's behavior. So it was something of a relief when Apple TV+ announced it was picking up Fielding's new series, very loosely based in British history on the famous 17th-century highwayman Dick Turpin, then still untitled , in which he would return to his improv-style comedy troupe roots.

The series, now with the extremely unwieldy (and super SEO unfriendly) title The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin , debuted on March 1 with three episodes and continues to air new installments through the month. Our reviewer wasn't that impressed , comparing it to the late lamented Our Flag Means Death . Ironically, when we interviewed Fielding and the show's executive producer Kenton Allen , Fielding admitted that was one of his biggest worries ahead of the show's debut. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Hugh Bonneville and Noel Fielding in 'The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin' Season 1

Telly Visions: Were you worried about Americans not knowing who Dick Turpin was? 

Noel Fielding: I think it freed us up in a way. It's not a story that everyone knows, as, say, with Robin Hood. People roughly know what he did, and there are quite a few different versions, going back to Errol Flynn. That story has been kicking around for a while. We did know that Americans probably wouldn't know who he was. But then, we thought, well, once they know he robbed stagecoaches and nearly got hung, once you've established those things, then really you can it gives you a bit of freedom.

Kenton Allen: He is basically a rubbish cowboy.

Fielding: I think it's quite good that he's a real person. When I was a little kid, I heard about Ned Kelly in Australia. Somehow, I knew that was a real person. There's something about that, having a certain gravitas or something, like with Robin Hood or Billy the Kid, you ask, 'Is it a real person?' And it is... Yeah, it gives it an extra little stamp of approval or something. Something about it. But this is a comedy, so we took quite a lot of liberties with the character. If it were a drama, we'd have to stick closer to the real story. 

TV: Most people coming into this would not know anything about Turpin; I was fascinated by how much you used this to highlight nontraditional masculine roles as heroic. How did that evolve in telling the story?

Fielding: I've never been a traditional male character. I've always been quite androgynous and worn makeup and dresses, slightly gender-bending in a David Bowie way. But we just thought what would be nice is to make the character so much more inclusive, kind, and creative rather than violent; a little bit woke and just a bit more in touch with his feelings and other people's. It's the 17th century; he's surrounded by hardened criminals who are not interested in talking about that stuff.

Allen: He's a visionary! He says, "I can see a time when men and women will get paid the same money, doing the same job." Everybody burst out laughing. The comic conflict is embodied in all of that.

Noel Fielding, Tamsin Greig, and Ellie White in 'The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin' Season 1

Fielding: He says highway people rather than highwaymen. He's not preachy, either. I don't think the thing about Dick is he's suggesting these things, but he's not preaching or it's not forcing anyone into it. He's just quite easygoing and liberal and wants everyone to be happy and in love. So he's just, hey, what if we do this? You know, rather than he's not sort of telling people off? I think the key to him is he's fluid.

Allen: He's quite fluid with his ideas, and he's trying to be modern and try and do the right thing, you know, but what gets a bad name does, it just means being awake to other people's thoughts from feeling awake to people's thoughts and feelings in the 17th century.

TV: One of the other things that also really struck me is that, you know, there is a long history of cross-dressing in British comedy, Dame Edna, and so forth. Was it the cross-dressing that came first, and you guys sort of thought, well, let's go in an inclusive direction?

Fielding: Things evolve naturally in comedy. Julian and I as a double act [in The Mighty Boosh ]; he's a very northern, quite big guy, man, much more manly than me, he's got a mustache. I was always the sort of slightly more feminine, we were a man and wife in a weird way; when you're in a double act, you're sort of a couple. I'd wear catsuits and makeup on stage; a lot of that I took from Bowie and glam rock. [When playing] a character, I've always tried to carry those traits through everything, because that's what I do in real life. I feel like you have to put an element of your real self in these characters. Otherwise, they don't have that authenticity.

Allen: It was organic, really, just embracing Noel's incredible creativity, his incredible comic mind and spirit.

Fielding: My mom and dad are quite like hippies; I was brought up in a carefree way; they encouraged me to be into art, drawing, painting, wearing whatever, and expressing myself however I wanted to. I naturally just did that stuff, and we wanted to keep an element of that, and we thought it would work, so I dressed up as a nun. I think that's what people want from me. They want that sort of weird freedom and that sort of androgynous escapism.

Allen: Life's pretty grim a lot of the time, so to escape into the world of dictatorship and 17th-century Britain and have some fun with it, I think, is quite joyous.

Asim Chaudhry in 'The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin' Season 1

TV: So this is the question that I wanted to ask in the TCA Winter Press Tour panel, but they called time: Everybody brought up other British comedies when trying to find something to compare Dick Turpin to, from Monty Python to Horrible Histories , but nobody brought up Our Flag Means Death ...

Fielding: ( Jumping in ) Oh man! I was very worried about being too similar, and obviously, I love Taika [Waititi, the series creator and star], all of those guys, and everything they've done, really! Flight of the Conchords, What We Do In The Shadows...

Allen: Wait, what's the question?

TV: ...My actual question was that I always felt like OFMD was basically aiming for the AO3 fanfiction crowd. I wondered, How would you feel if the fanfiction community picked up Dick Turpin and ran with it?  

Fielding: ( laughing delightedly ) I'd love that. But we were a little bit worried about Our Flag because when you're writing something, you think, "Oh, no, they're not doing something too similar?!" I didn't watch them until after we wrapped because I didn't want to imitate what they did. But [once I did], I felt like it was okay. It wasn't anything alike.

TV: We're about out of time, but you did say you're going to stick with The Great British Baking Show ; they're just letting you out of the tent for a bit. You and Alison Hammond have such great chemistry... If you guys get a second season of Dick Turpin , would you bring her aboard?

Fielding: You know what? She's quite good at acting. We did some little sketches for Bake Off, and she's a really good performer. She's very funny in a very natural way. She's cool and an amazing person. I've really enjoyed working with her.

The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin is streaming on Apple TV+ with new episodes every Friday through the end of March 2024. 

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Ani Bundel has been blogging professionally since 2010. A DC native, Hufflepuff, and Keyboard Khaleesi, she spends all her non-writing time taking pictures of her cats. Regular bylines also found on MSNBC, Paste, Primetimer, and others. 

A Woman's Place Is In Your Face. Cat Approved. Find her on BlueSky and other social media of your choice: @anibundel.bsky.social

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• Noel Fielding
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‘We’re going back to silly’: what’s the next turn for British comedy in era of nostalgia?

It’s no joke for new shows as classic favourites live on while investment in sitcoms and sketches falters

There is a quip beloved of comedians, when asked if their industry is going down the pan: “Nostalgia? It ain’t what it used to be.”

But for fans of well-worn jokes, and the shows in which they appear, 2024 could be truly a golden era.

There has been a spate of classic comedies announcing a move to the West End in recent months, the sketch series The Fast Show is beginning its nationwide stage tour , and the UK tour of Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening! has already added dates.

John Cleese ’s stage production of Fawlty Towers launches in May, and in autumn, a musical version of Only Fools and Horses will start a 30-city tour of the UK after a successful West End run.

It’s not just theatre. Alan Partridge will soon be back on screens in a new six-part BBC mockumentary series, while some shows have never gone away: reruns of Dad’s Army are still broadcast on a Saturday evening on BBC Two. The comedian John Kearns joked in his live show that he’s competing for audiences with Arnold Ridley, who played Godfrey in the show and was born in 1896: “He’s a Victorian!”

None of this is a joke, however, for the acts or new shows. In November, Ofcom warned that scripted comedy – sitcoms and sketches, rather than panel shows, which are significantly cheaper to make – was an “at risk” genre for the fifth year running.

Sitcoms, of the type made in front of a live studio audience, have “essentially stopped being made”, says Mark Boosey, the co-editor of the British Comedy Guide . According to its data, there were 899 hours of comedy made in 2014, including 226 hours of sitcom, compared with 633 hours of comedy, including 126 hours of sitcom in 2023.

Boosey said: “Last year, the only sitcoms filmed in front of a studio audience were Mrs Brown’s Boys and Not Going Out: the rest was ‘single camera’ sitcom. The money has shifted to other forms of comedy.”

One example was The Bear , a “dramedy” that explored mental breakdown and dysfunctional families via the pressure-cooker environment of a Chicago restaurant kitchen. It won best comedy at the Grammys and Emmys .

But comedy’s next turn will be different again, says Kenton Allen, the CEO of Big Talk, producers of Noel Fielding’s new romp, The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, and the comedy-thriller The Outlaws , starring Stephen Merchant.

“Comedy is expensive and prone to failure, but when you get it right it’s a gamechanger,” Allen says, pointing to the success of the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner , which ran for six series. “I think we’re seeing a return to ‘hard funny’, where every other line is a joke,” he says, citing the BBC’s Here We Go . “We’re getting back to silly.”

Shane Allen, the former BBC director of comedy who set up the comedy production company Boffola Pictures, says that in a world where streaming is king, classic returnable comedy shows are a good investment for commissioners. “Comedy is a super genre which has a very long tail and over time becomes incredibly good value, as well as being something that overly indexes for young viewers.”

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While recognising the long-term benefits of comedy, broadcasters have been hit with the reality of high inflation, spiralling costs and falling advertising revenues, while the US writers’ strike has taken a toll on co-production funding.

The BBC director of comedy, Jon Petrie, argues that the BBC – which styles itself as the “home of comedy” – is well aware of its responsibility to future comedy nostalgia-seekers, and says commissioning by the broadcaster is steady, pointing to a £10m increase to the comedy budget in 2022. But in a challenging environment the BBC, like its rivals, had to be cannier about financing, he adds.

“In the past maybe the BBC could just pay for everything outright [but] we’ve moved on from that,” says Petrie. “We’re still doing the same number of shows every year, [but] sometimes we’re asking producers to be a bit more entrepreneurial.”

That might mean a co-production, as with The Outlaws, shown on BBC One in the UK but Prime Video overseas, which he argues means better value for licence fee payers. “Our main interest is UK audiences and licence fee payers … so they can turn on the telly, and watch something funny that reflects their lives,” he says.

Liam Williams, the writer behind Ladhood, has noticed “less money and more risk aversion” in comedy in the past decade, but thinks reports of its imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated. “There is a tendency towards this slightly catastrophising belief that everything is terrible now, but there is still lots of good stuff being made,” he says, highlighting the highly acclaimed Dreaming Whilst Black .

And while the rapid rise of on-demand and subsequent sense of panic as viewers cancel their subscriptions has left the comedy world feeling “a bit uncertain and dysfunctional”, he thinks people will always return to the shows that made them laugh in their youth. “Hopefully by that point we will have a few quid,” Williams says. “And we can spend it on nostalgia too.”

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