In Conversation

05 December 2008 04:50 BST

Joly recommends beers and banter

Successful comic/journalist Dom Joly pours his heart out to inthenews.co.uk revealing his likes and dislikes in the celebrity world, the formula for good new age comedy and his future career plans.

Joly has enjoyed a rather varied and successful career in the media, pioneering Trigger Happy TV, writing books and contributing pieces to several well-established publications, as well as pulling off "the biggest blag in TV history" with his travelogue Dom Joly's Happy Hour, an excuse to get drunk in a host of different countries. But the anarchic sketch comedy of Trigger Happy TV launched his broadcast career, revealing his less than obvious humour through his relentless attempts of self ridicule inspired by one man in particular.

"My hero was Dennis Pennis," he admitted. "I just loved his kind of ethic and I liked the fact that he was just basically getting up people's noses. He had a really clear statement which was basically that the whole world of celebrity is so ridiculous and has this PR bubble around it and I'm here to prick that bubble.

"But the best thing about Dennis Pennis and what made me realise that I could do comedy was that I went to see him filming outside Harrods - he was chasing Barry Manilow, I think - and he was the first person that realised that cameras had got small enough that you could buy a camera in a shop and it was good enough to put it straight on TV."

Joly continued: "Suddenly that changed everything, you didn't have to hire a really expensive camera crew that cost a fortune and means you can't hang around all day waiting for stuff to happen. But if you've got your own camera... that's how Trigger Happy was done and it meant we could work for nine months because we could afford to do it," he added.

The success of the show led to his recent licensing of a US version, with which he now refuses to be associated, deeming it "embarrassing" after producers made a sub-par version of his British comedy hit. "I took my name off the credits and I've always said it's the worst thing ever, never watch it, it's a pile of poop," he said.

Joly’s slight glitch to reputation on a global scale has not de-motivated him in continuing to produce witty, original entertainment. Currently he is filming a series called The Complainers, a show he describes as "Watchdog with Uzis".

"It's tapping into that thing that everyone's grumbling about Britain being a bit rubbish and a bit expensive. We're kind of like a consumer A-Team."

Describing a scenario from the production which aims to inflict revenge on topics of grumble he said: "I was going through some councillor in an unnamed London borough's bins at three in the morning the other night, as they're very keen on recycling so we were seeing if they were doing that."

His recent appearance on ITV2's reality TV show Deadline was a little distant from his usual grounding however, as he readily admits.

"The reason I did [Deadline] was that truly and genuinely, I have always wanted to be a paparazzo. I have this weird skill that I can see a white van with tinted windows and being able to spot Rod Stewart's ex-wife from 200 metres. And the joke was always that I should be a paparazzi. And the more I hung out with paparazzi, the more I realised it was very similar to what I was doing on Trigger Happy," he told inthenews.co.uk.

"It's like hunting - Big Fame Hunting, I suppose. I agree, it was the most low-rent thing to do but I just loved it," he added.

"If it all goes pear-shaped, I'm definitely taking it up," he went on. "I got some fantastic pictures. I crawled through a field camouflaged and spent two hours in a little homemade bunker and got some pictures of Liz Hurley herding her cows with her family, which the TV show was too chicken to show."

To read the rest of the inthenews.co.uk interview with Dom Joly, click here.

Lewis Bazley and Alicia Francis