Andy Hamilton: Without comedy I would have ended up a sarcastic English teacher
Writer and comedian Andy Hamilton, who is a regular panelist on Have I Got News For You as well as the writer of sitcoms Outnumbered and Drop the Dead Donkey and star of BBC Radio 4’s Old Harry’s Game, is bringing his stand-up show to Cambridge where he promises an evening of reminiscence and revelation.
Is there a theme to your new show?
No, it's just laughter really. I suppose the nearest thing to a theme is that it is my take on the world, and society and human nature. But that's not really a theme is it? That's a perspective, I suppose. A lot of shows at the moment are confessional, aren't they? People get up and talk about their struggles with their demons. But I don't really have any demons. I mean, maybe I should get some and I could do jokes about them.
Part of me wonders, how unique can you be? Lots of people have had their relationships breakup. How interesting is that? I find them hard to connect with. Sometimes, if there is a story involved, it's great. I remember going to see a brilliant show by Mark Thomas, which was all about how his very good friend who it turned out was spying for arms firms, because Mark was an activist against the arms trade. And the whole show was about the shock of discovering that one of your friends had been spying on you. And that was fantastic. Because it was such an unusual and startling story, but someone talking about a failed relationship, I mean you can hear all that stuff in the pub with your mates. I'm starting to sound like an old fuddy duddy.
Would you say you prefer your comedy to look outwards?
I'm not interesting enough to look inwards. There is not enough going on. No, I don't think that's fair. I do like to look out at the world rather than into my own soul.
Will you be talking about your memories of being a student at Cambridge University?
It might come up given that I'm back in Cambridge. It had its ups and downs but, overall, I made some good friends and I had a good time and that's where I started writing and performing so, although I didn't know at the time, that was going to be quite an important time for me. I don't think I'm banned from too many pubs after all this time, and part of the problem will be of course what I can remember.
You’ve said previously you felt like a fish out of water at Cambridge, why was that?
To begin with I did. I had not met public school boys before and there were a lot of them at Downing College. There were also a lot of very bright Welsh kids from Methodist schools. There were kids from more humble backgrounds but there was a preponderance of public school boys. Yeah, that was interesting.
And you didn't take the traditional comedy route of joining Footlights, but you joined Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society - what was that like?
That was a charity that did shows for people who couldn't get away - in old people's homes in prisons, borstals, children's hospitals, that kind of thing. But once or twice a year, it staged a commercial show for audiences paying money to come and see it at the ADC Theatre. It was good training going into a prison to perform, in terms of building up your resilience as a performer. But the shows at the ADC were the first times I've got up knowing people had paid money to watch me and, provided they didn't walk out, it was reassuring.
Did you ever manage to make the prisoners laugh?
We did, yeah. I mean, I don't know if they were laughing for the right reasons...
It was a slightly odd situation. As undergraduates we were probably a little bit worthy and self important and we were going into a prison and often doing shows to hardened criminals - IRA terrorists and stuff. They would laugh, but they'd also heckle sometimes and you'd get a ‘mixed’ response. I think that is putting it politely. We did a tour of Scottish prisons and borstals. And we got quite a lot of mixed responses.
You put a bucket down for people to write questions for the second half of the show. What kind of things do people ask?
Just about every kind of question you can imagine ranging from the very serious to the very silly but that's the fun of it for me. The second half of every show is always completely different from the last one. And I've no idea where it will go and one of the benefits of being about to enter my 70th year on the planet is do have quite a big fund of comic stories or opinions or jokes, so there's quite a big reservoir of stuff to draw on.
You have written a lot of sitcoms including Outnumbered and Drop the Dead Donkey, is there another one on the cards?
I haven't got a sitcom idea, waiting to burst out of my brain at the moment. The ideas come along in a way that's hard to define. They just kind of fall on you without any warning. And a friend of mine once said that if you stop and think about where the ideas come from it would be like asking a centipede how it walks. There's a kind of instinctive element to it that you don't you shouldn't analyse too much.
When did you first realise you were funny?
I suppose the first time I got up in front of an audience. All my mates seemed funny. And I was just one of the bunch of funny mates. The acid test was when people started paying money. I was doing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1974 and a young BBC producer called Geoffrey Perkins came backstage afterwards and said, ‘Who wrote that?’ And I'd written most of it, and he said, ‘Well, I think you should think about writing for a living’. And up until that point, I hadn't really considered that possibility. But Geoffrey expressing that enthusiasm gave me confidence. So without Geoffrey, I probably would have ended up being a sarcastic English teacher instead. Once I started writing, after a couple of months, I do remember thinking, oh, this would be a great thing to do for the rest of my life. So I was very lucky in the sense that a lot of young people don't find the thing they really want to do. Some people never find it, but I found it quite early.
As a young child, your house in London was next to a bomb site. What was it like growing up there post-war?
There were lots of bomb sites in London then. Because there were still a lot of places where no new housing has been built on the site. And so my house did look over a bomb site until I was about 13 or 14. And it was a place that we were not supposed to go and play in, even though it looked quite exciting because there were loads of cellars that you could hide in and stuff. I told a friend a few years back that I couldn’t understand why my parents were adamant that we shouldn't play in the bomb site. And he said, well, it's probably in the name, isn't it? And stupidly it had taken me 30 years to realise that there could have been unexploded ordnance there. Also, there were rats and all sorts. But you watch any Ealing comedy, from the late 50s, early 1960s It's always full of scenes of people being chased across bomb sites. So, it wasn't exciting. It seemed the most normal thing in the world strangely. And I realise looking back now how unnatural it was.
Of course London has changed completely now...
It changes very fast. My wife Libby said that I should do a show about London called ‘That used to be a pub’. Because her and the kids got so fed up with me saying we think we're out and about in London. I would point at a building and say that used to be a pub. Because yeah, I mean, London. It's always was dynamic, but it's now it changes really fast. Yeah.
Famously, you have played Satan for years on Old Harry’s Game. So, what are your thoughts about religion now?
I think religion is very funny. Because you don't have to look very far in any religious text to stumble across things that are sort of seem absurd. People in authority are always funny, but I don't remember ever actually believing in any of it. I still love churches. And when we go away on holiday, the kids used to hate it because every time we went past a church I would say: let's go have a look around. I love the atmosphere in churches. And I like that kind of social cohesion that churches give. I just can't swallow any of the story. I was a choir boy and I used to love singing. I suppose when I was tiny I must have believed it. But I don't remember really buying into it.
Your Satan's is not terribly evil.
No, he's like a middle management Satan. The central premise of Satan in Old Harry's Game is that he thinks that the system is broken. He thinks it's a bit ridiculous that he's still having to preside over this stupid kingdom under the ground and try and dispense punishment to all these human beings who will never learn anything anyway. He's a kind of perplexed Satan. He gets verycross but he’s not the kind of Satan that would terrify you in your bed.
Why have you decided not to use social media? It’s a place where people write a lot of jokes.
I've got mates who like to put jokes up on social media but it's just not an experience that I am suited to. A part of me worries that I'm someone who probably could get a little bit addicted to it. And a lot of my mates seem to be spending all their time having arguments with strangers online, and that doesn't appeal to me. So I just stay off it. I know it can be a good publicity tool and stuff. I kind of think life's a bit too short to argue with strangers all the time.
If you were in charge, what would you have sorted out by now?
What, if I was world emperor? I would be the worst person to give any sort of power to because I think I would I would be an authoritarian and a dictator within half an hour. Probably like a lot of comedy people, I shouldn't be trusted with any real responsibility.
That's interesting in the light of Boris Johnson's premiership...
Boris is not really, well, he's not knowingly a comedy person. He was a journalist. And again, I think you could make a serious case for not letting journalists get their hands on the levers of power as well…
Andy Hamilton will be at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge on Sunday, June 18. Box office ents24.com/cambridge-events/west-road-concert-hall/andy-hamilton/6719088
