The Noble art of comedy

THE name of the tour never bears any resemblance to the content of the show, Cramlington-born comedian Ross Noble assures me as he arrives at Newcastle City Hall to promote his Mindblender series of shows, which is already heading for five sell-out nights at the venue in November.

“It’s not like I go ‘I’ll do a show about something’ it is what it is. So I just come up with the title and an idea for a poster,” explains Noble who feels he’s up to “Lindisfarne territory” in terms of his popularity with fellow Geordies.

Does he still regard the city as home? “It’s funny you know, because I turn 36 this year and I moved down to London when I was about 17, so I will have lived away longer than I’ve lived here. But it does feel like home because I’ve moved around quite a bit. I’ve never settled in one place in London and moved to Kent, then Australia for a while and now I’m back in England. So I haven’t really put down roots anywhere else.

“There is something odd because shops change but the general geography of the city centre is pretty much the same.”

The dilemma, admits one of the kings of improvised comedy, is what influence his North-East roots has on daughter Elfie.

“She’s a weird one my daughter because my wife’s Australian, who can’t stand the cold of the North-East, so it’s quite an exotic mix. She’s a half-Geordie, half-Australian hybrid and I always joke that I’ve created a human being who can withstand either end of the temperature scale. “She’s got such a different way of growing up to what I had.

We’ve brought her up by taking her to Whitley Bay and Tynemouth and taken her on the beach and she’s in a one-piece romper suit like a winter outfit and there are kids on the beach just in their pants. I told my wife that you don’t notice kids being in their pants when you grow up with it,” he says.

Noble reckons taking Fran and other friends from the south of England down to the Bigg Market in winter is one of his most enjoyable moments.

“They don’t believe it and I love showing them. I’m taking people down there and saying ‘ta-dah’. But what I love about Newcastle is that it’s such a positive place, and that judgement is not clouded by the fact that I’m from here. There are some cities like Newcastle, Dublin and Liverpool that have a sense of fun about them. That’s what I miss about being away.”

Noble certainly needed a sense of humour having started as a club comedian at 15, who didn’t much like football or beer.

“Certain people refused to believe I wasn’t gay for a long time, but it’s perfectly acceptable,”

he jokes. He bursts into laughter about his current standing of 11th greatest standup comic. “I was number ten. Ricky Gervais got past me and jumped from number 11 to number three. Michael McIntyre wasn’t even in the list the first time (in 2007) and someone in the top ten was bumped down to number 20. These things are ridiculous because it’s like a massive compliment, although it can be based on how much you are on telly.

There are these votes for the world’s sexiest people which are always won by famous people, it’s never won by a shopworker in Hexham.

So it’s quite arbitrary. I was in the top 100 Geordies of all time and to get in that list is not to be sniffed at. I think I was a few places behind Marcus Bentley who does the voice of Big Brother (I’m joking),” Noble says.

On the face of it, Noble looks like an internet whiz having recently toured the UK based on Twitter followers’ advice. As always, the truth is rather different.

“I’ve got a Facebook account and I had something on Myspace. I don’t sit in front of a computer and it was only when it got to the point I could send an email on the phone that I moved into this kind of social media.

Eddie Izzard had become obsessed with it and had something like a million followers on Twitter. It was insane.

“He basically said I had to get onto Twitter.

Because I can do it on the phone it takes no time at all. It’s the lazy man’s way of being connected to the world. Sometimes I use it instead of Google. I’ll go ‘I’m looking for such and such’ and my followers will tell me ‘it’s this, that or the other’. The Twitter trip was a week last year on my bike starting from the Triumph factory in Hinckley and I asked ‘Where should I go’ and ended up eating a pork pie in Melton Mowbray and visiting the world’s smallest pub. The next thing might be the ‘Where can I do a gig?’ tour because it was a great way of meeting people,” he says.

IHAD to ask him about the almost unbelievable TV appearance on cult BBC show Have I Got News For You where he and fellow panellist Ian Hislop drove guest chairman Alistair Campbell to playing the bagpipes to drown them out.

“There was a bit where he kept giving the other side lots of points and it got up to 42 and I turned to him and went ‘Do you want to make some sort of claim for 45?’ and he said ‘Very funny 45 minutes (the time claimed it would take Iraq to launch weapons of mass destruction)’.

“I’m up to 15 or 16 appearances on the show. When I go out there, I take the news stories because I and Paul Merton can go off on a tangent about them. For Alistair Campbell, because I was with Ian, nobody was expecting me to take the mick. My favourite bit was when he said ‘Hang on, that isn’t on the card’ and I said ‘Just change it’. Actually, in fairness to Alistair Campbell you can’t be Tony Blair’s head of communication and not have a thick skin, but I was impressed that even though I shouted ‘War criminal’ in his face, he knew the score and knew that the show didn’t take any prisoners,” says Noble.

He reckons the high point of his TV career so far was taking over from Paul Merton when his fellow comedian was forced to sit in for disgraced chairman Angus Deayton in 2002.

Going back to Mindblender, I ask it he’s decided on any subjects for the tour yet.

“No, it’ll just be me talking nonsense as usual,” he laughs.

•  Ross Noble, Mindblender tour: Warm-up performances, tomorrow and Saturday, Billingham Forum.

October 26 and 27, York Grand Opera House, 0844-871-7627 November 13 to 17, Newcastle City Hall, 0181-277-8030